I did not say, and I do not think, “that users hate being asked to log in to online services when first using a device”. If that was true, this would be much less of a problem, because many more would just skip the step! The problem is that this step will *seem*, at the time, like a reasonable thing to go through. Users won’t have any of the information they’d need to realize that it’s a waste of time. And we can’t tell them, because we don’t know what apps they’re going to install later. (Which is one of the reasons that this is not about our choice of default apps.)
Android invites people to set up a Google account (and Samsung a Samsung account, and Apple an iCloud account) for several reasons. One of them is commercial interest, which no longer applies to us. But another — restoring your device from a backup, which also doesn’t apply to us — is part of the setup process itself, so it’s reasonable to ask at setup. (And Android invites you to set up e-mail accounts specifically for the purpose of fetching your e-mail.) But they do not, as far as I know, invite you to set up a WeChat account or a Facebook account or a Line account, just in case you later use an app that uses one of those account types, even though tens of millions of people will. Because it’s a better use, of the population’s time, to defer that to the moment when each individual uses a relevant app (or, as in Nautilus, a relevant feature of an app) for the first time.
I did not say, and I do not think, “that users hate being asked to log in to online services when first using a device”. If that was true, this would be much less of a problem, because many more would just skip the step! The problem is that this step will *seem*, at the time, like a reasonable thing to go through. Users won’t have any of the information they’d need to realize that it’s a waste of time. And we can’t tell them, because we don’t know what apps they’re going to install later. (Which is one of the reasons that this is not about our choice of default apps.)
Android invites people to set up a Google account (and Samsung a Samsung account, and Apple an iCloud account) for several reasons. One of them is commercial interest, which no longer applies to us. But another — restoring your device from a backup, which also doesn’t apply to us — is part of the setup process itself, so it’s reasonable to ask at setup. (And Android invites you to set up e-mail accounts specifically for the purpose of fetching your e-mail.) But they do not, as far as I know, invite you to set up a WeChat account or a Facebook account or a Line account, just in case you later use an app that uses one of those account types, even though tens of millions of people will. Because it’s a better use, of the population’s time, to defer that to the moment when each individual uses a relevant app (or, as in Nautilus, a relevant feature of an app) for the first time.