don't forget office suite:gdoc, and conferencing: hangouts/meet/whatever they force down your throat tomorrow. this is specially pernicious as they are actively using it to undermine Firefox in the workplaces. their proprietary plugin took 2 months to be available in Firefox after they rebranded hangouts as meet. and now it only supports SD video and crashes frequently.
the very arguments the article gives to shun off this attack is what i think makes it very possible and the best option. Scale.
NSA demand backdoor on CPUs. other States figure out how the backdoor works and how access to it is allowed on the silicon. Instead of attacking ever changing firmware and whatnot, just develop something that will work on that authentication component of the always-present backdoor. The backdoor interface won't change so often as it is dictated by the NSA and likely designed by a committee.
Done. Now the economies of scale allow you to just place that one component, which will work all over the place, for a very low price/complexity (all you really have to do is to place it in the input signal for the CPU and all it have to do is to filter a very specific pattern. the rest is just visual and camouflage).
This also gives you the benefit of not having to work a payload for your attack depending on capabilities. You will always have the same capabilities. It makes perfect sense. And makes it extremely cheap!
instead of thinking of a solution that is cross platform and works on your walled-garden devices, you want to bring a walled-garden solution to your other platforms?
So, it does exactly the same thing my Nexus one did 5+ years ago before they bought companies and shut them down?
if you don't know what i'm talking about, android got a SIP client working pretty fast from the comunity, and the best provider was using gizmo5. which google bought one year before launching the nexus one. Then on year after launching nexus one, they pulled an apple on it and shut down the service.
then they launched google voice. which was a we-own-all-your-data-in-the-cloud version of gizmo5, but it was nice because they gave me lots of free stuff that almost never worked (phone dialer integration, sms, etc). until the clients they released became a piece of garbage (the last build is still from 2012, then they started to force the features trhu google plus and more recently via hangouts)