Platform dependence keeps costing builders

AOSP source releases are so late that developers disassemble libraries to report bugs, and the top comments say "it's time to fork it." Amazon is raising prices across the internet. Commenters say eBay and AliExpress are now often cheaper for mundane goods, and that FBA sellers face a thicket of fees. Amazon's Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU, where the EU is investigating. Strafe pitches federation as a way out of Discord. Older threads in the feed show the same pattern: Stripe shutting down a business, Google Cloud suspending production at 1am, Cloudflare blocking Docker pulls in Spain during football matches, and an AWS billing bug showing a $1.7 billion total.

The pattern: a platform's open or fair posture lasts only while it needs you. Once it has power, access terms tighten, support disappears and developers eat the cost.

The counterpoint is that forking Android or leaving Amazon is not realistic for most. Federated and self-hosted options are earlier-stage and get dismissed on quality.