[cbs]

I know you mean well, but I'm aware of that and it is tangential to my point.

What I'm taking issue with is the underlying inertia that causes it to be in a self-reinforcing loop as most widely supported protocol for mobile. When I got my iPhone I had to pick between a handful of sync protocols, EAS being one of them. My Android devices let me download apps that add new sync providers.

I don't so much as care about the day to day machination of google and microsoft as the ability for our tech to cope with whatever they want to throw at us. In this case google happens to be behind both gmail and android, but my point still stands that the android platform is a better suited to dealing with generic external changes w/r/t features that need to hook into the built in functionality of the device. I'm not saying I think it is better overall (I do have an iPhone), I just think this is one place where the architecture of that system is strong and wish that other mobiles took a similar foward-thinking design. If they did, it might not matter at all that google dropped X for Y, just a slight inconvenience while you install the requisite adapter to maintain the same level of integration.