I hate it. I really enjoy programming, and don’t enjoy social niceties. And I definitely don’t enjoy someone looking over my shoulder all the time.

So that leads to 2 situations: I’m programming, but someone is looking over my shoulder and stopping me constantly (or doing nothing), or I’m watching someone else program and constantly frustrated that it’s not me.

Even during an emergency I’m often better off just doing my thing solo, and the other person using their own methods to investigate and fix the problem. Chat is still available to share information and progress without it being a constant annoyance.

The only thing I think it’s really good for is learning to program, and unless the people are the same level, it’s probably only good for 1 of them.

I think there’s a bit of language confusion in the article there (‘search engine’ etc), but I’m very interested to see if they make Google allow other app stores to act like first-class citizens, instead of heavily restricting them, even if the user does everything they can to allow them to install and maintain apps.

As for Apple… I would probably have been an iPhone owner long ago if they weren’t so heavily restricted. I like their products, just not their refusal to allow apps that didn’t come from their store.