> But it is just so tiresome that Google never consults their community. There was no advance notice of this change that I could find. Just a bunch of frustrated users in my inbox blaming me for breaking something.

I get it. This unequivocally sucks. It's a clear loss of functionality for a group of people who are educated about the advantages and disadvantages of embedded EXIF data. But I don't honestly think Google could have consulted their community. It's just too big. So when the author says:

> Because Google run an anticompetitive monopoly on their dominant mobile operating system.

I don't think the problem here is that Google is anticompetitive (though that's a problem in other areas). I think it's just too big that they can't possibly consult with any meaningful percentage of their 1 billion customers (or however many Android users are out there). They may also feel it's impossible to educate their users about the benefits and dangers of embedded location information (just thinking about myself personally, I'm certain that I'd struggle to convey they nuances of embedded location data to my parents).

I will note that Google Photos seems to happily let you add images to shared albums with embedded location information. I can't recall if you get any privacy-related warnings or notices.

> But I don't honestly think Google could have consulted their community. It's just too big.

The thing is, they frequently do. They have developer relations people, they publish blog posts about breaking changes, they work with W3C and other standards bodies, they reply on bug trackers.

But, in this case, nothing. Just a unilateral change with no communication. Not even a blog posts saying "As of April, this functionality is deprecated."