Turned off Google Play Services and Google Play Store since the purchase of a new smartphone & set up F-Droid. Everything just works with much less storage space used (for some reason most proprietary apps from Play store usually come together with ~200 MB of bloatware). I tried to flash a custom ROM, as Sony provides instructions for that, but the build is failing, and I don’t want to sacrifice the proprietary Sony image-enhancing algorithms. So I’m just sticking with the Google Android but no Play Services option.
IMO, what is good for open-source web solutions, is that, if someone doesn’t like the vanilla frontend, one can write a new community-based frontend as a web, desktop or mobile solution, like Whalebird. It greatly expands user’s choice and it is a good selling point but goes unnoticed.
Regarding new features, it is a matter of the communitations’ protocols (ActivityPub, etc.) New features should comply with the specification and not introduce platform-specific ‘spin-offs’ as they would threaten the maintainability of the protocol and interoperability between platforms and in the long way ruin the whole fediverse. However, I have not read the specification of ActivityPub and what it can do. Maybe I have to try it first because it looks very promising.
Sony Xperia 5 II