Mobile is not a neutral platform — Benedict Evans

From an insightful platform perspective

"Of course, all this sort of stuff is a big reason why Google bought Android in the first place - Google was afraid that Microsoft (it was that long ago) would dominate mobile operating systems and shut it out. The obvious fear was around things like preloads, and the justice of that fear was proven right with Maps, where Apple Maps now has 2-3x more users on iOS than does Google Maps, despite being a weaker product - the 'good enough' default wins and the platform owner chooses what that is. But the deeper issue is that we haven't just unbundled search from the web into apps - we're now unbundling apps, search and discovery into the OS itself. Google of course has always put a web search box on the Android home screen (and indeed one could ask why there needs to be an actual browser icon as well) but this is much more fundamental."

Mobile is not a neutral platform — Benedict Evans