The biggest part of this undoubtedly has to be the ability to use phones outside the Nexus/Pixel lines.
I've been a Project Fi customer for a few years now and love to wax poetic about it, but always have to add the caveat of "oh, but you can't use your current phone.". Which is a bigger deal when many of my friends are using iPhones and would never consider switching to Android.
Apple is 24% of the smartphone market so anything they do on their their systems only affects that minority portion and isn't denying competitors access to the market.
Android on the other hand has a 74% share of smartphone market so anything they do impacts a majority of the market and could limit others access to the market.
Not necessarily, several of my co-workers are big into Overwatch so when the Overwatch League started up in January I started watching matches with them. After a few weeks of asking questions as we went, I felt like I had a pretty handle on it and could start to contribute to the discussion.
You are absolutely correct though. Those first few weeks I had no idea what was happening aside from the occasional head-shot.
As someone who grew up in Columbus, went to school in Cincinnati, and moved back to Columbus for work, I think you're being a little dramatic here.
I don't know where you're from in the Midwest, but the vast majority of people I interact with around here are extremely live-and-let-live. In fact I can't remember the last time I came across someone or a situation that was actively hostile about beliefs or sexual orientation. Obviously these are just my anecdotes, but I run in a pretty sexually and racially diverse scene and they all love Columbus as well.
Your hyperbole and vindictive reactions to a diverse region of the country are certainly going to help close the divide.
You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right.
I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
My daily mixes never flow correctly. I'll have a softer, technical indie track followed by a technical heavy metal song. It's bad enough that I can't use them at all.
My friends and I average over 20 hours a week as well and we're all pissed about their recent decisions.
The removal of messaging/direct sharing was the final straw for me.
They also ripped out messaging and the ability to share music directly after allowing it to die a slow death that involved it being completely hidden form the web client.
As a big fan of data analysis I've also noticed that they no longer accurately report or record user preferences and instead heavily weight popular artists.
They also only sent out the "Year in Review" to people that were subscribed to their spam emails.
Those two things are what brought me to them over Google Play Music. I'm currently in the process of switching back.