I'm having the same issue. I thought it was just me or something with their cloud network. I also haven't been able to download Android Studio from the website for a month. I couldn't even download it from my Macbook so probably not the same issue.
It's not personal experience. It's a segment of the market and also a lack of familiarity. The Macbook Air ships with only USB-C Thunderbolt and a large group of people are fine buying a dock to connect it or HDMI to thunderbolt.
While reading this article I thought it'd be interesting to read this on Android desktop mode and went looking for a cable while forgetting I could just unplug my USB-C laptop.
I often am looking at another element before interacting with it with my mouse. With eye tracking enabled menus hovering over an element immediately because I'm looking at it becomes an annoyance.
Yea, I don't think a 1-to-1 translation of mouse movements with eye tracking is the correct answer here. I do think it's probable that eye tracking + {X} can be a 1-to-1 translation for clicking for 80%+ clicks.
Maybe X is a button on the keyboard. Maybe X is a gesture.
I think the most monopolistic portion of Google besides search would be their hold on the ad tech industry (and even then you have other online giants Meta, Tiktok, Amazon, etc.) but I don't necessarily understand how you can say they have a monopoly on consumer products large enough to drive adoption of Android especially 15 years ago.
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome and Android either have direct competitors in other ecosystem or are open source. YouTube and search are the only ones I can think of without direct competition. And the competition for these products come from Apple and Microsoft who are more/just as entrenched in owning and growing their entire platform.
Something like 70% of email is controlled by Google, and you cannot operate an email service if you do not meet Google's demands. If your business isn't listed in Google Maps, it doesn't matter what industry you are in, Google has killed you. Chrome and Android aren't open source (at least, not the version running on 99.9% of their respective install bases), and both operate as near complete monopolies. Chrome has used its position to reshape the very standards of the web to meet Google's business need and try to block competitors. Android has no competition at all, as I explained above: For manufacturers building devices it's the only OS in town.
While ignoring all these huge monopolies, you claim search has no competition. Ironically, about a third of global search queries are serviced by Bing! I would go so far as to say the monopolies above are as powerful, or moreso, than Google's grip on search.
Yeah I truly don't understand how you can look at email and maps and say Apple and Microsoft aren't also competing in those spaces.
Chromium and AOSP also aren't trivial contributions to open source and having the ability to fork those projects is much preferable to me than a proprietary solution that's more democratic once it achieves market dominance. Manufacturers building their own devices having nowhere to go was a problem pre-Android and a reason they'd rather license Google's OS rather than compete against Apple. And I think the decision of web standards has grown to be a bigger issue beyond what W3C or Google should be handling at this point, we treat the internet as public utility with the promise of standards without actual regulations and our browsers are an extension of that mess currently (not to say government is actually equipped to solve the issue).
I wasn't ignoring those other services I was doubting their monopolies unless we're changing the definition. I'd say the majority of dominant tech products have a large market share with few competitors but which are monopolies? I'd agree Android/Chrome was a monopoly if iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Safari, Windows, Azure, AWS and I guess bing all start getting a look at for markets with seemingly only one/two other competitors, especially when you look at the fact they contribute little to nothing back for public benefit.
That statistic does not mean what you think it means, it's about clients. That ignores the fact that people open their Gmail with Samsung, Apple, and Windows mail apps. 66% of folks are not running around with icloud.com addresses.
The YouTube integration launched after one year. The games were a single click, had direct links and could be launched by voice assistant on any compatible cast device. It was also as easy to port games too as any Linux port would be. Online play was free, subscription unnecessary unless you needed 4K and more than 50 games in the subscription on sign-up.
Launching a Stadia game was never truly one click for me. It always required several, and then you'd have to endure the same old load screens and splash screens and menus as any other platform. The load times should have been faster, and they should have had platform requirements to make it faster to jump into gameplay without nagivating menus after load. I heard them talk about deep links directly into gameplay but I never saw it, it must not have been implemented in many games. But I did see a bunch of Stadia account related clickthrough BS that added more clicks and more load time (and sometimes bugs) when all I wanted to do was play.
> It was also as easy to port games too as any Linux port would be
And nobody bothers to port to Linux either. It isn't trivial in many cases. And I believe Stadia wasn't just as easy because of a Vulkan requirement along with other platform integration and certification stuff. An unhappy medium of too many platform requirements to be trivial to port to, but not enough to actually make Stadia a better experience than other platforms.
> Online play was free
Only if you bought games at full price, trusting Google to run the service forever. Clearly a risky bet, and the risk was obvious to everybody at the time, not just in hindsight.
> more than 50 games in the subscription
The selection was not compelling compared to other platforms' subscriptions. If they had had a larger catalog to draw from, that could have helped.
I'll echo your sentiment. I got to game free for nearly three years and I get to keep any hardware I purchased to do so. I personally grew tired of Stadia due to the lack of public support and negative sentiment any time it was brought up so I'm happy to be getting my money back (especially seeing as some games are providing second licenses on top of refunds) which can go towards a GPU while being given time to finish any games in the coming months.
Consuming cannabis everyday all day will also results in dramatically less consequences in your life than consuming alcohol the same way. The abuse factor of cannabis is really low all things considered and gets even lower if you avoid smoking.
