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I think Google's goal here is to make your phone a personal assistant, similar to a human personal assistant. And humans arbitrarily change their behaviour in o

I think Google's goal here is to make your phone a personal assistant, similar to a human personal assistant. And humans arbitrarily change their behaviour in opaque and uncontrollable ways. Hopefully your phone won't change it's behaviour because it had a rough night last night, but it looks like it's going to take a guess at what you want, and learn if it gets it wrong. If you don't want this, maybe you'll get the option to switch off that feature, or you can use one of the community builds of Android, and make sure you buy phones that are supported by them.

chrismorgan 8y ago
Android is focusing more and more on this mode of operation, with Google essentially taking over your life. (Even if you think I’m expressing it too strongly, you can’t deny that Google and the likes are deliberately encroaching on personal life more and more.) With most phones, it gets harder and harder to turn these features off. The Google app, for example, typically can’t be disabled, and to get as close as possible to that you’ll need to install a different launcher, which preference may not even persist across reboots; and even if you succeed, it may have latched onto things like long press on the home button. And good luck on pulling all of Google’s tentacles out of everything. Community builds of Android are not in the slightest bit user-friendly (e.g. hard to install, and probably don’t get you access to the Play Store where all the apps are). Unless you’re technically very competent, they’re basically not a feasible option. This is why I’m sad at the failure of Firefox OS and a few other similar efforts—even Windows Phone, for all that Microsoft is heading the same general direction.