Over the course of my career in Cali and Silicon Valley, I've been fortunate to work for some top tech companies on exciting projects (all through recruiters). I'm very thankful to recruiters.
Twitter has incredible value as a tool to break realtime news and events. The problem is, it buried in a veneer of fruitless and redundant tweets that nobody wants to dig through. If they can figure out how to surface the value 'there's gold in them hills!'
I used to use Evernote back in 2012. I found the ui confusing and not very useful for my needs. I then adopted Workflowy for simple to do lists, organizing info, and that works great for my style; have not gone back to Evernote ever since.
My Italian ex-roomates/friends (Italian 30-something entrepreneurs living here in L.A.) echo many these sentiments you write. No matter how much they love their country and families they are living (and creating) here and in New York for many of the reasons you mention above.
As an expat myself, you would expect expats on average to be substantially more inclined to be critical of their home countries than others: After all we left.
Not all of us left because we were unhappy, but almost all of us left because we for one reason or other saw more opportunity elsewhere (e.g. in my case I left because getting larger financing for my startup at the time was easier in the UK). We're on average likely to be horrible misrepresentative of our countries as a whole.
I'm not a developer but is it true that while an App developer who enables Facebook Anonymous login wouldn't know their users--But FaceBook would? If so ouch.
Don't count on Apple to take a stand. Apple is no better. They along with Microsoft and Sony funded billions into Rockstar Consortium, inc which stifles innovation through the patent warchest.
Citation needed on Apple beating up on smaller companies by using patents.
If anything Apple's stood in the way of patent trolls and threatened to inject themselves in any lawsuit filed for the Lodsys patent, making it much harder for Lodsys to win or back out.
They've been engaged in a patent war with Samsung, Google, et. al, but this is a whole different game. I'm not saying I approve of this, but they haven't been picking on little companies.
Microsoft, by contrast, is making hundreds of millions in license fees for questionable patents impacting Android devices.
I'm not disputing, as I know nothing about this, but isn't the Apple V Samsung thing very similar to Microsoft V Android? Big companies throwing their weight around? Or is Microsoft hitting small guys?
Microsoft is hitting up a lot of Android vendors for licensing fees. They're not even trying to protect any particular intellectual property. They're just shaking down people for money.
It's Intellectual Ventures that was co-founded by two former senior Microsoft employees that's the worst offender by far.
Those companies that invested in IV probably did it for strategic reasons since barring that they'd probably end up targets.
If you haven't started building your audience do so before the app is finished, or even before you start building your app. Nothing worse than building a better mouse trap when there's no mice. Best of luck on all your apps.
