Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me to Google from other services years ago.

Two examples:

- maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting.

- gmail: Previous/Next-message buttons flake out constantly (grayed out - clicking does nothing). New formatting options are hard to use and obnoxious.

And an old one that I ran in to again today:

- there is no (intuitive) way to copy a URL from google search results without all of the google redirect garbage. This fundamentally degrades the world-wide web. For example, I want to email a link to a pdf. If an in-browser pdf reader is not available, then the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link. I clicked the "share" button in hopes that this might give me the link; but no, it wanted me to share on G+.

I was laughing at this parody. Then, I found myself wanting a KitKat.

Perhaps there's something to this presentation style after all!

downvotes don't change the truth of the observation. Android is no longer meaningfully open, other than a years old core of basic functions.

The problem is that your observation isn't true. Here are some of the under-the-hood changes in just the most recent releases of Android:

  -OpenGL ES 3.0
  -Bluetooth low energy/Bluetooth AVRCP
  -restricted profiles
  -VP8 encoder
  -new DRM framework
  -SELinux
  -various other optimizations and APIs

Yes Google is moving some functionality to Play services. Yes it is worth discussing how this may impact the future of Android as an open platform. No, that does not mean that Android is no longer "meaningfully open", especially not in the matter-of-fact way you are presenting it.