No one's saying they shouldn't. If the current business model isn't sustainable, then it's a predatory lock-in scheme to monopolize the market and then take advantage of the people who've become dependant on your product.
Couldn't agree more. If major price changes are required to make the product work well after customers have been "enticed" in with a reasonable cost, it is underhanded to say the least.
It's more than just "entice". Google has crippled apps which don't use FCM since Oreo by limiting their ability to run alternatives which have a blocking socket waiting for new information. Only choice is to use FCM or lose essential functionality.
FCM is part of the core API now. They don't want other shitty solutions constantly waking the device up and eating your battery. That is why only FCM i.e. a trusted source is white listed. It's easy to peddle half truths hear just give it an anti Google color and carry your pitch forks.
Former Firebase and Parse employee. Back when Parse was coincidentally working on GCM (aka FCM) support to improve reliability over our own blocking-socket push network Google threatened to shut down our customers if they used our network. I personally liked our approach which used our network in China and Google elsewhere. I would believe Google were just concerned with Android quality, except our customers reported that they were being scraped from meetup lists, interviewed, and told that Facebook was pricing Parse low to steal data from our users.
We went quickly from "Why shouldn't they charge for a great product?" to "they deliberately toasted competing solutions by creating a white-list with only their own."
Admittedly, some other solutions were shitty and ate into the battery, but this wasn't the case for everything and forcing everyone onto a proprietary platform if they need an always connected background service is not "a great product," but a defective one.
I get your point that people expect differently from Google, but Google brought that upon themselves by marketing Android as an open source alternative to iOS. Now they've got the market share and developers, they're no longer interested in marketing it this way and are now apparently more interested in cementing the walled garden.
The battery issue is a valid concern, but I don't buy that this policy is purely to fix that problem. They took the opportunity to make sure people are passing all of their data through Google services in order to have full functionality on their devices.
I remember some software VC lady explaining this tactic among others for OSS businesses on the software engineering daily podcast. Her world seemed so inherently competitive, yet here she was, revealing her cards. Even though burning bridges to get ahead is typical behavior, it remains destructive. Calling it out helps us all move in a better direction.
