This seems like a trivially silly article. In essence it argues: "OSes are special sauce and apps are commodities - Google should recognize this and stop trying

This seems like a trivially silly article. In essence it argues: "OSes are special sauce and apps are commodities - Google should recognize this and stop trying to differentiate their app designs." That's certainly a valid opinion, but its reverse is just as defensible - if one considers services to be special sauce and OSes to be commodities, then it directly follows that app UIs should first be consistent across platforms. And considering that Google's entire business model is based on the latter view, why on earth would they take the author's view?