I’m sure they got better, but they never won me back, that original feeling of disappointment is still associated with the games for me.

[🆕 Cosmos 0.12 - HUGE update! All in one secure Reverse-proxy, container manager with app store, integrated VPN, and authentication provider, now has a Full Monitoring suite with alerts and notifications (including presets for anti crypto miner hacks!) 📈📊 ~reddit

That’s how it should work, but many services have been increasing pricing with email warnings for the last decade.

My friend has PS+ and it has multiplied in price for 3-month intervals without him ever confirming the new price. He’s had it for a decade without touching it and genuinely wouldn’t know he’s being charged so much more than he agreed to if I didn’t tell him.

This is in Australia which normally has better protections for consumers, but it’s possible we don’t in this case as it’s happened to me with every subscription I’ve ever had they send a n email and then start charging an amount I never agreed to.

The only exception was AEW+ via Fite.tv which was in USD, that was the only time I ever lost my sub when the price changed, which given it went up +40% I was glad they handled it respectfully.

Our rollout was severely impacted by political interests, but the Australian government tackled this at a national level with building a National Broadband Wholesale network for all the ISP retailers to resell.

It was a lot easier however given how underfunded our existing monopoly telco left the old network.

Unfortunately Rupert Murdoch stated in New York to shareholders that the network would undercut their Australian business, they then used their 67% newspaper market share to back the opposing party and have them downgrade the rollout of the network from fibre to copper.

Now half the country can’t get a full 100mbps and the upload isn’t synchronous for 99% of households.

I think there is more room with another Android based OS akin to FireOS, a fully Microsoft version of Android, with their desig language over top of what wouldn’t need porting outside of Google based dependencies.

Given the decline in service quality and the increase of 8.8 million subs in a quarter, they can continue being worse for more and the general public will support it.

The only thing I care about is quality shows being made from good networks, still getting their funding, but streamers are turning into trash TV from the 2000’s.

FrugalUsenet via old sale page $4/m & NZBGeek $6/6m.

My Usenet backbone & indexer cost 5 USD per month as well.

AntennaPod is available on F-Droid.