According to the article, that’s due to more features and more updates.

Well, you are not expected to grip around the lens, you don’t want to smudge the lens anyway. Hence the lens’ thickness is not that relevant day-to-day, while I do agree that it can still be relevant in certain cases.

I think the only thing that should be right is the price.

Everything else - form factor, thickness, aspect ratio, whatever - can and should be experimented with, and nothing will break because the apps adapt anyway.

Well, unless they are unoptimized for tablets in general, which most are…

It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.

ReactOS?

Honestly, I’m shocked there aren’t way more. We have the Google Store, Samsung Store, Amazon store and…that’s it?

There are plenty of repositories for F-Droid, and from what I’ve heard, also for Aptoide.

That said, it is not really beneficial for most companies to compete with Google Play since they know the user base will be smaller, user experience will be worse (install warnings, no auto-update), and people may get affected by malware if they don’t pay attention to where they are downloading things from (may download a scam app directly instead of the legit app store).

Why do you think this is something “nobody asked for”? There is clearly a market for large wide-screen tablets and this form factor just makes them pocketable.

For other Chromium browsers or those who don’t see this yet, enable chrome://flags#extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-warning.

Search engine crawlers identify themselves (user agents), so they can be prevented by both honor-based system (robots.txt) and active blocking (error 403 or similar) when attempted.

Vivaldi and Brave have the option to disable the Hangouts extension in settings, which should disable this.

As linked in the article, it is indeed used for “Hangouts” (Meet) troubleshooting.

Well, there is a separate system for pirating prevention, the Google Play license check. That has existed for years.