[TheZenPsycho]

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.

[HPLovecraft]

what obnoxious, noisy prattle! (lol)