I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos.

Edited per requests

Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.

This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.

This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.

I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.

As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.

>principles

You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?

Renting, however, does not work that way. Any DRM-protected download is a rental. Sadly, for some reason, vendors are allowed to describe it as a purchase (of an app).

I don’t know why you are giving up.

With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.

If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.

Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.

With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.

This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.

Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)

I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.

I myself forgot Microsoft once (cough) sold e-books.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Music

Early in the pandemic I had to use many different systems as an academic, when lots of different contacts pivoted online in different ways. Chime was the least of my problems; it just worked when many other systems struggled.

I liked the Chime meeting/calendar integration at Amazon that could ring everyone at the start of the meeting, meaning that most meetings started promptly.

I was initially confused because I thought they were just pushing a mobile access pathway for the normal Epic store, and I had no interest in that, but Bloons TD 6 is pretty fun, so I was willing to give it a shot to see what they'll give away next month https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile#:~:text=Free%20Give...

FireOS devices aren't certified by Google and so, they do not come with "Gapps" (including the Play Store) preinstalled. Even if they were, Amazon might have some reservations about preinstalling Gapps (which run with higher than normal privileges), effectively letting Google get hands on its user's purchasing habits.

All that to say, this is a business limitation not a technical one.

See also: Google's iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582494 (2014).

Mind you, I had to sideload it for both of them.

AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime.

(I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them.

I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need!

I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.)

I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35)

De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic.

If that's the case, it's a bad idea, Amazon is not prepared to maintain their own OS.