Livre d'Or

This is a useful summary, thank you. It's annoying, but the internet is being silo'd so much these days that you often do need an app to interact with various websites from a mobile phone, and those are less likely to have generic versions. I don't mind paying for apps, indeed in many cases I'd rather pay up front than have a supposedly free app where you have to make in-app purchases, or which serves intrusive ads or behaves badly with data. There are a couple of things I've already paid for via Google Play which I would like to retain, but they're probably not the ones I most need.

Most of the apps that are most useful to me are essentially gateways to online utilities, Twitter and Tumblr and other social networks, but also things like Runkeeper and Pocket which run partly in-phone and partly in the cloud. And most communication functions do need to have some way of talking to other people who might be less concerned about Google than I am. I've installed Gibberbot precisely because it does generic XMPP so I can still use it to talk to friends who are on GTalk or Facebook or non-encrypted Jabber. In lots of ways the problem goes way beyond Google, it's everybody using their own proprietary stuff instead of having common protocols, but that seems to be the way the world is.