They usually don't make sense optimizing before achieving these levels of expenses. I mean, for a really long time the expenses are so low that it would cost more to engineer these solutions in the first place, and then they suddenly run through the roof exponentially.
But mainly, priorities and "it's not that much in comparison to all else". And perhaps not even tracking the costs properly :)
I've found myself learning stuff better when there is no IDE correcting me all the time and auto-generating stuff out of thin air. IDEs are awesome once you know what you're doing but I do also see the reasoning for forcing to use an ancient (and still quite powerful) editor.
Disclaimer: I do most of my coding in Vim but use IDEs every once and a while.
And in my experience, when you do finally get the update, it sometimes ends up breaking a lot of existing features. Pixel users have reported multiple times about degraded battery life after an update, and my last experience with Android 10 release was that the software was full of small but annoying bugs.
I've been an Android user since 2.2 and have favored Google products (Nexus phones and now Pixels) exactly because of the vanilla experience and in my case quick updates. I just bought my first iPhone because of the frustration that the recent updates have caused me with Pixel 2. I feel like Android is taking huge steps back in refinement and that is really sad. Even the latest Pixel products look the same as two years ago and have taken steps back in battery life. I wouldn't have believed if someone told me a couple of years back that I would by an Apple product this year.
Android is cheap and it's widely used because it's open. If manufacturers weren't able to customize it to their needs, we would still be living in a world with separate OSes for every single manufacturer. This is important especially in Asia where the market is completely different from western market. In Asia it's also very important to be able to live without Google proprietary software in Android because for example in China it's currently blocked. They are using Baidu for all the things we are using Google services for.
Year of Linux on the Desktop is hard to see since corporate users are so tightly coupled with MS ecosystem. If Microsoft could build at least equivalent mobile OS as Android or iOS, they would get pretty much all corporate customers to themselves and it would most definitely affect private customers as well. Oh, and Windows has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years so there's really no need for a basic user to change over to Linux.
There are already multiple separate app stores for Android and not just the Google Play. This is nothing new for Google to be honest.
And if they were to make Android a closed system, what would make me buy an Android phone instead of an iOS phone anymore? Openness is one of the biggest selling points for Android.
You would now, but what if they had cost money in the first place? Like, you wouldn't have got used to their services for free for years? This is something people often forget when they are saying "of course I would pay money".
The world would be a whole lot different place (not necessarily any better) if Google services cost money instead of gathering data and selling it forwards.
Except that Chrome can never turn into a new IE6. It keeps updating automatically, it respects the standards and is nice to use. Oh, and it isn't installed automatically on Windows or Mac. It also is made by a company whose business is based on Internet services - not by a company that used to mainly compete on a completely different area of software business.
It's an entirely different thing to just create a great product that people want to use instead of "being forced to" use. Firefox has been dragging itself behind for a long time and was nowhere near enough competitive as a whole package. Quantum has changed things but there are still some rough edges that need polishing (e.g. sometimes it just likes to freeze the tab completely). Chrome's web development tools are IMO top notch and I'd say it is the biggest reason why all the development happens on Chrome.
Was feeling kind of sad to see this is the last year these appear. After watching the video also understood the reason behind the decision - same problems from year to year so there's really not much new stuff to talk about.
But mainly, priorities and "it's not that much in comparison to all else". And perhaps not even tracking the costs properly :)