It's like the game where you say the same sentence but emphasize a different word each time.

"WE don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging..."

"We don't KEEP logs of everyone who is messaging..."

"We don't keep logs of EVERYONE who is messaging..."

Etc.

I think this is a meaningfully different variation on the "Google doesn't commit to their products" convo. If we look at the subset of those where, retrospectively, we see that others enter the same space executed successfully and built big businesses, it's a new way of articulating Google's collapse of strategic vision.

Wave is a good example. I think Stadia is another one, they checked out right as handheld gaming started taking off. Probably others once you start looking through everything.

What was your experience with the Wave code base?

It was a mystery at the time, but in retrospect it seems obvious that it was, at a minimum, a precursor to Slack and Teams. And could have been something else too, it was raw and open ended enough that new usage norms could have emerged and pushed it in any number of directions, setting the tone for any number of possible use cases. It could have been a social network, if the idiosyncrasies of community usage imprinted that on it.

As ever with Google ventures, especially during the DBE era, all they had to do was stick out and let it take on a life of its own. But I think what it takes for growing into an organic identity is more than the average time a developer works on a Google project.

>Or do have these Fossify application some extra privacy features that do not come with the default ones?

It's this one. Google's built-in apps are closed source with undisclosed telemetry. Fossify are open source, and they don't send your contacts or calendar entries to Google. Google's apps also serve Google ecosystem lock-in, and Google's ecosystem serves ads.

The non-google options on the Play store give you the option of not sending telemetry to Google, but at the cost of typically violating privacy in other ways or including ads.

Fossify avoids either of those costs.