[my_usernam3]

As an ex fanboy (or fanboy lite) who has circled into hater section of recent, I can give you MY reasoning.

For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge company, so only strike 1.

They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.

And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.

Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.

[hbn]

Me too. I was all in on Google services, owned a Nexus 4, 5, 6P, Pixel, Pixel 3. Even a couple Nexus 7's, and a Chromebook. I was into rooting and custom ROMs, I got people to use Hangouts, I had a Google Play Music subscription, I backed up all my pictures to Google Photos (still do that one), I was learning Android Development and had an app published, etc.

But after so many years of being jostled around and seeing every product I liked and used destroyed and brought back as something worse, I had to get off the train eventually. Google has no long-term plans. They only know how to ruin things that were once good. Android isn't the fun, open mobile OS it once was. It got more locked down with each update and became a cheap imitation of iOS. So eventually I just bought an iPhone. I went through so many messaging apps and renamings and relaunches of various products and services.

At some point you realize Google has no respect for their customers and no interest in making products that are nice to use. They only want to optimize people's attention so they can turn it into ad revenue. I celebrate their failures now, in hopes it'll one day shake something up enough that they'll have to try giving a shit for once.

[dougmwne]

I had your experience, except when I finally traded in my android for a iPhone I felt like a FOOL. It was so much better on every level. Just fantastic, polished and near perfect in every way. It was light years ahead and I realized that I had Google ecosystem Stockholm syndrome.