Yes, you're criticising the comment, but your criticisms constitute mainly of strong attacks on its tone (ultra-polarized, hysterical, noisy, prattle) and perceived effect (manipulative, obnoxious), plus some extremely strong contradictions without supporting evidence of matching strength (utterly and complete wrong, does not belong on HN).
I do think that you're probably correct with the meat of what you're saying, but there's no question that at best half of your comment is relevant to the actual discussion and the other half describes itself at least as well as it describes the comment it purports to.
My suggestion: your vitriol should be proportional to the strength of the evidence you present rather than to the strength of your feeling.
While technically your comment isn't an ad hominem since you attribute all these terrible things to the comment rather than the person, I can completely see why it rang a lot of the same bells as an ad hominem argument would for some people.
You're right, it's not ad hominem, but your post is chock full of overly emotive (read, manipulative) language. To illustrate, I'll remove the emotive language and you can see the difference:
>Android is no longer meaningfully open, other than a years old core of basic functions.
This is wrong, and things I think are wrong don't belong on HN. I suspect you weren't voted down because of the (logically fallacious) appeal to consequences.
Just to be clear, Google has always had closed source, proprietary Google bits (gmail, maps, etc. Originally they even built these as a big binary blob in the platform image, and it was "fixing fragmentation" when they moved them to separate apps), and the open source Android bits. Everything you heard about Android 4.3 is in the open source bits.
I do think that you're probably correct with the meat of what you're saying, but there's no question that at best half of your comment is relevant to the actual discussion and the other half describes itself at least as well as it describes the comment it purports to.
My suggestion: your vitriol should be proportional to the strength of the evidence you present rather than to the strength of your feeling.
While technically your comment isn't an ad hominem since you attribute all these terrible things to the comment rather than the person, I can completely see why it rang a lot of the same bells as an ad hominem argument would for some people.