If one lives long enough, one can notice certain ironies. I clearly remember waiting and hoping for an invitation to obtain a GMAIL account. The invitations were slowly released and began an enormous integration of Google services. At that point, I gave up my MS Hotmail email account and the use of Yahoo and Alta Vista for searches.Once smartphones arrived, I stayed with Google's Android as it provided me with greater freedom of choice than the well-known alternative.
I did abandon my GMAIL account years back when I got sick of the constant privacy intrusion. Step by step, I've been untangling myself from the chokehold of Google.
I've always heavily used customization to sport very unique phone icon screen configurations. Google allowed that. So today, it was relatively painless to ditch the native Pixel launcher altogether. As I now only use Bing and its AI chatbot for searches, I started to hate the prominent Android search bar that would not allow alternate search engines. This is the Microsoft launcher running on my Google phone.
I'm saying goodbye to another key part of the Google experience. I know the company is working hard on Bard. But they've already lost me and will have to successfully innovate to pry me back from more modern techniques, even if those seem to be coming from such an unlikely source as Microsoft. The Richmond, WA company has clearly been on the uptake while Google's been sleeping.