Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.

Some people say you can use a de-Googled Chromium browser to enjoy the fruits of Chrome without supporting Google’s ad business. I say just use Firefox.

By the same token, when some people say to buy an Android phone and deal with CFW, I say just get an iPhone.

I mean either way, Google gets your money and you contribute to Google’s market share by buying one. Not using Google Play Services as an individual does not hurt them nearly as much as their efforts to keep you from doing so implies it does.

Of course, switching phones can be costly, but if you’re in the market for a new one, I would say if you’re going to pay roughly the same price, let it be the more private one, albeit the one that is further from open source. I mean it runs iOS, which is a stripped down version of macOS, which is UNIX certified, but you can’t run a few apps that Apple doesn’t approve of. Fortnite is back and emulators are back though, so a lot of bases are covered.

That said… the keyboard sucks. Sometimes if I’m gonna be typing (e.g. using Lemmy), I’ll actually turn on my old Galaxy S10, just to use Gboard (which is on iOS but sucks there). I like my 16PM for a lot of things, but typing isn’t one of them.

So yes. You can stop rewarding Google’s bad behavior by not buying their phones. Draw a hard line between your personal data and their servers. But in doing so, consider getting in bed with a different monster rather than “the devil you know.” It’s not an easy decision. And, as a guy who’s been mainly on iPhone for almost 10 years… I kinda want a Pixel. Maybe not the newest one, but I mean, I’m using a 6-year-old Galaxy phone and it’s fine. I like both platforms. Both have their strengths. But I personally trust Apple more than Google. To each their own though.