I don’t really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.
I’m still bitter over Inbox.
I used to be excited about new things from Google. Tried to get into every beta, downloaded the newest released apps etc. But not anymore.
I just read about tasks being removed from Google Keep. Then the feature removal from nest hubs. Do they have a unified strategy at all? Or is it just the whims of a manager’s daily musings that drive what development does?
Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.
This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.
In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?
Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.
My god, the assistant, yes. After catching up with Siri it was actually useful. And now it seems all it does is plop whatever you say into a Google search. And since they killed that, too, well…
I think deep down, everybody, including Google, realizes this all ends with them retaining their customer s solely through the blackmail they have accumulated over the years.
I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There’s barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)
They have an agenda, which isn’t aligned with your agenda. They only care about profitability, so they kill any projects not supporting that goal. Some projects are created to gather specific data sets about users, and the project is shut down when the data is captured, regardless of how popular the project was. They are always doing something with an ulterior motive. Once you understand that then you won’t be mystified by their decisions anymore.
You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products.
No kidding.
It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can’t create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.
Android users literally run their lives out of Google Calendar. Think you can share your calendar with a friend from your phone? Think again. It’s back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!
Oh you’re not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phone’s browser. I dare you.
It’s unbelievable that so much of the gsuite on mobile web doesn’t seem to have been even touched in nearly a decade. It’s insane to me that they’re just ignoring that part of their own website even as it’s easily accessible.
Wait mine does that automatically, it’s actually pretty creepy and I’ve been meaning to figure out how to disable it or at least make it ask for permission
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
I’ve heard a theory that says all the apps and services they make only have the purpose of collecting data. Sort of like limited time experiments. Once they get all they need from one of them they kill it and move on.
Sometimes they pretend to roll a dead service into another product in order to drive customers to that product but it’s done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.
I don’t have YouTube Pro or whatever its called now and when I listen to music on my Google home it plays an ad after ever song. Since I have switched to Pihole and blocked googles DNS servers the only ads I get are to buy premium YouTube which I assume are hardcoded into something somewhere.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google’s euthanasia project:
YouTube
Google Search
Chrome
“core” Android system + Play Store (it counts as one)
AdSense
The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can’t fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.
Good catch on GMail - it’s at the same time a vector to invade your privacy and an additional barrier for people leaving the Google ecosystem battery farm.
Going to be called YouTube Podcasts. Soon to be spun off into Google Wallet + Podcasts, then to be renamed Podcasts Pay, then Pay Podcasts, then Google Chrome with Podcasts.
For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
Killed 8 months ago, Pixel Pass was a program that allowed users to pay a monthly charge for their Pixel phone and upgrade immediately after two years. It was almost 2 years old.
Proton Mail is great, it’s privacy-focused and stores all your emails in an end-to-end encrypted format. It even has a feature that let’s you easily transfer all your stuff from Gmail or other email providers: https://proton.me/support/easy-switch
MXRoute needs you to have your own domain, but they let you create unlimited accounts at that domain. You’re just limited by total disk space. Sometimes they have good Black Friday deals.
I’d strongly suggest you use your own domain. It means you can easily change provider again in the future while still using the same email address. Get a domain for your surname and give accounts to your family :)
Antennapod is fine, although it is annoying that there appears to be no way to make it so that it automatically plays the next episode of the podcast you are listening to rather than what you purposefully place into the que.
So I’ve been using it on YouTube music and now podcasts suck just as much as when it had Google Music merged.
Now when i just want to listen to my single daily morning podcast, I have to remember to turn the damn thing off because it constantly wants to autoplay random podcasts I have no desire to listen to in the first place. Just ends up throwing my mood off for the day sometimes when it plays some crap that annoys me.
Good app but they got bought and immediately upped their price by a lot from what I recall. It’s why I moved on. I think it was a more than 3x price hike in the US and as much as 5x elsewhere.
Shame because their desktop option is tied to that subscription. I couldn’t justify paying that much just to swap phone/desktop.
I still use them since i got grandfathered into the pro plan (or whatever its called) without having to pay for a subscription. Not sure if i would pay for it now if i had to.
However, still a really good service for the cost to sync podcasts across lots of devices for anyone who listens to a lot.
I’m glad they open sourced it, but I’m waiting for an F-Droid release. It seems like they’re struggling with this, it took them months and still nothing happened
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Podcast Republic is my go to.
I use Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, but apparently it supports Podcasts too. I haven’t tried that feature yet.
It’s a self-hosted system that you run on your own server.
Good thing I never started using it! Fuck you Google, Reader, Inbox and Music taught me never to get into your shit again.
Raising a glass To Inbox, we hardly knew ye
I don’t really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.
I’m still bitter over Inbox.
I used to be excited about new things from Google. Tried to get into every beta, downloaded the newest released apps etc. But not anymore.
I just read about tasks being removed from Google Keep. Then the feature removal from nest hubs. Do they have a unified strategy at all? Or is it just the whims of a manager’s daily musings that drive what development does?
Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.
This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.
In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?
Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.
My god, the assistant, yes. After catching up with Siri it was actually useful. And now it seems all it does is plop whatever you say into a Google search. And since they killed that, too, well…
I think deep down, everybody, including Google, realizes this all ends with them retaining their customer s solely through the blackmail they have accumulated over the years.
I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There’s barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)
They have an agenda, which isn’t aligned with your agenda. They only care about profitability, so they kill any projects not supporting that goal. Some projects are created to gather specific data sets about users, and the project is shut down when the data is captured, regardless of how popular the project was. They are always doing something with an ulterior motive. Once you understand that then you won’t be mystified by their decisions anymore.
It’s not even profitability. It’s about what looks good on a resume.
New projects look good. Maintaining old projects doesn’t.
I’m not ready to be reminded of the loss of inbox
There’s still no better email client than inbox. It was so fucking good
It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.
No kidding.
It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can’t create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.
On the mail side:
Reporting phishing isn’t something an iOS user would ever do. Desktop please!
Filters? What’re those? To the desktop, come on!
Android users literally run their lives out of Google Calendar. Think you can share your calendar with a friend from your phone? Think again. It’s back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!
Oh you’re not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phone’s browser. I dare you.
It’s unbelievable that so much of the gsuite on mobile web doesn’t seem to have been even touched in nearly a decade. It’s insane to me that they’re just ignoring that part of their own website even as it’s easily accessible.
I’m still waiting for the day when we can create an event from a message in Gmail.
Wait mine does that automatically, it’s actually pretty creepy and I’ve been meaning to figure out how to disable it or at least make it ask for permission
I think they actually recently stopped doing that, unless the mail comes from a contact.
Oh neat
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing “inbox” into the address bar to get to my emails.
I’ve heard a theory that says all the apps and services they make only have the purpose of collecting data. Sort of like limited time experiments. Once they get all they need from one of them they kill it and move on.
Sometimes they pretend to roll a dead service into another product in order to drive customers to that product but it’s done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.
It would certainly explain a lot.
I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.
How else are they gonna half ass implement that into youtube and make that shit bloated af.
It has long form content, Tiktok clone, Main music delivery system, Twitch clone, And now, Podcasts.
👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼
It seems like their trying to roll everything into the over media app and subscription
Kind of makes sense, all their other apps are pretty fragmented and crappy.
It also has games now.
I don’t think it’s rolled out to a lot of people. No one at work can see them except me, but my Google app has games that I can bring up.
I don’t have YouTube Pro or whatever its called now and when I listen to music on my Google home it plays an ad after ever song. Since I have switched to Pihole and blocked googles DNS servers the only ads I get are to buy premium YouTube which I assume are hardcoded into something somewhere.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google’s euthanasia project:
The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can’t fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.
They’ve primarily been an ad company ever since they acquired DoubleClick in 2008.
Gmail and Gsuite pretty safe too.
Good catch on GMail - it’s at the same time a vector to invade your privacy and an additional barrier for people leaving the Google
ecosystembattery farm.I’m not sure on GSuite.
GSuite is well used in corporate settings as a cheaper alternative to O365 enterprise.
Going to be called YouTube Podcasts. Soon to be spun off into Google Wallet + Podcasts, then to be renamed Podcasts Pay, then Pay Podcasts, then Google Chrome with Podcasts.
Google Nest Home Chromecast TV with Podcasts Premium+
With different tiers of subscription.
This sounds unfortunately real. Insanity.
Try AntennaPod, it’s on F-Droid
Grabbed AntennaPod from the Play Store. It’s been a perfect replacement.
I’m kind of into Podscast Addict. Not sure how it compares, but its pretty good.
It’s not open source
deleted by creator
Ah ok
One of the best apps on any platform
For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’
One of my favorite podcast app.
R.I.P.
https://killedbygoogle.com
Tombstone 2018 - 2024 Google Podcasts
Killed 26 days ago, Google Podcasts was a podcast hosting platform and an Android podcast listening app. It was almost 6 years old.
Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
🤯 😂
Well, that seems particularly scummy.
They did allow users to upgrade once first.
That’s good. The article linked to by the graveyard made it seem like they didn’t.
Indeed.What a rip-off! :(
My problem is when they kill services that are default installations on Android, then never remove them from the OS image.
I’m looking at you Allo.
Plugging Podcast Addict. I don’t even use the paid version, but it is awesome!
I’m just making sure I live up to its name:
Unfortunately not FOSS 😭
That is unfortunate. But it’s like an old-school program: does everything possible, just consider the options yourself!
Unfortunately it’s also filled with trackers: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.bambuna.podcastaddict/latest/
Same here. Had it for years and it’s always been great. Eventually paid for Pro to support them.
My almost 7,000 hours of podcasts listened through Podcast Addict since 2019 would agree
Been using this one for a decade and it does everything I need it to.
i think its a bit more simple than that
If a product is really good experience for you (ie. Not crammed with ads) AND you dont pay anything for it, then it’s not profitable.
Google didnt become one of the biggest companies in the world by doing volunteer work for your benefit
They only exist to show ads and/or harvest your data. Once those goals are met, then the user doesnt matter. They NEVER mattered
I don’t think Google Podcasts required that much maintenance. However it didn’t have the ads that YouTube Music does.
AntennaPod has been a perfect, free replacement.
Googles antics with its service killing is what lead me to trying out the Apple walled garden.
Now I just need to quit Gmail somehow, sometime.
Proton Mail is great, it’s privacy-focused and stores all your emails in an end-to-end encrypted format. It even has a feature that let’s you easily transfer all your stuff from Gmail or other email providers: https://proton.me/support/easy-switch
For email, FastMail and MXRoute are good.
MXRoute needs you to have your own domain, but they let you create unlimited accounts at that domain. You’re just limited by total disk space. Sometimes they have good Black Friday deals.
I’d strongly suggest you use your own domain. It means you can easily change provider again in the future while still using the same email address. Get a domain for your surname and give accounts to your family :)
Mailbox.org
Worth the $30/year (they have a free tier too)
You should switch to AntennaPod.
That’s my go to, FOSS app that rivals the major apps.
There are other podcast apps on F-Droid also.
Antennapod is fine, although it is annoying that there appears to be no way to make it so that it automatically plays the next episode of the podcast you are listening to rather than what you purposefully place into the que.
So I’ve been using it on YouTube music and now podcasts suck just as much as when it had Google Music merged.
Now when i just want to listen to my single daily morning podcast, I have to remember to turn the damn thing off because it constantly wants to autoplay random podcasts I have no desire to listen to in the first place. Just ends up throwing my mood off for the day sometimes when it plays some crap that annoys me.
PocketCasts is good.
Good app but they got bought and immediately upped their price by a lot from what I recall. It’s why I moved on. I think it was a more than 3x price hike in the US and as much as 5x elsewhere.
Shame because their desktop option is tied to that subscription. I couldn’t justify paying that much just to swap phone/desktop.
I still use them since i got grandfathered into the pro plan (or whatever its called) without having to pay for a subscription. Not sure if i would pay for it now if i had to.
However, still a really good service for the cost to sync podcasts across lots of devices for anyone who listens to a lot.
Ah, the free plan meets my needs so I didn’t notice the price increase.
I’m glad they open sourced it, but I’m waiting for an F-Droid release. It seems like they’re struggling with this, it took them months and still nothing happened
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/2236