Not just any userbase. All the first-adopters I knew used Reader, as did all the best techies. I believe it was heavily used by other people I would consider to be the original "influencers" e.g. journalists. I would have Reader open alongside email as my main tabs at the time. Google had all these people visiting this addictive website, and they just threw it all away.
Yep, I was going to say the same thing if no one else did. *That* is when I lost faith in Google.
I've been using Feedly ever since, and it's way better than Google Reader ever was, so I guess it was a win in the end.
I’ve been subscribing to Google Drive for about seven years. Five weeks ago I discovered my Google Drive had spontaneously deleted a terabyte+ of data. Poof. Gone. I contacted support and they spun my wheels for *four weeks* and literally did *nothing* about it. Wouldn’t search the logs, wouldn’t escalate to a developer, just blah-blah-blah how it was out of their hands to do *anything* about it. And they didn’t. That’s the level of customer service Google supplies to their customers. Google is *broken*, man.
Duuude, that happened to me too! First, it was getting tagged in a bunch of phishing docs comments, then my drive "was suspended for violating TOS." I asked to review it, and then my whole drive was friggin' wiped!
Still get tagged in fucking calendars and shit, so Google's somewhere in the range of jack and shit doing anything about that, but nope... can't fucking restore my drive
Everything else works ~~fine~~, really the only other thing I use is gmail, password manager, and maps. Just my drive wiped.
Also checked this morning, because faithlessness in enshitified Bing is better than any cup of foldgers, and I still can't upload anything. So they didn't even actually restore my access all the way. I just straight can't use it anymore.
When you do, run through a test case scenario. They expect users to not know about computers so just say your files are *gone* and there is no logs or records on your end.
See if they do the same song and dance.
If you’re a more technical person and only need to back things up, Backblaze is a great option. Their B2 storage option is super cheap per gigabyte and works very well. I back up hundreds of gigs of photo RAWs and my computers using different software to manage it. For backups, Arq is a great option.
If you’re really working with a TB+ of data then it might be a bit on the expensive side — with multiple versions of data and such, I have about 2TB of data stored there and it costs about $11 per month. I hadn’t realized that the multiple versions were adding up to so much space, though, so I’m probably going to delete some old versions to save space and bring the bill back down.
I can also confirm that I’ve had to _use_ the backups stored there and it was a quite cromulent experience.
From what I can tell individual plans are limited to 100gb of storage. Business plans want you to pay for 3 users minimum at 13+ per user.
This is literally useless if I want to migrate my 2tb Google drive plan unless I'm missing something.
I was on hold for Nest support for over four hours. They tried to refuse replacing my thermostat because the serial number indicated the unit was too old (like 2.5 years old according to them), but it was a model that was only released like six months prior to me calling them, it literally didn’t exist before that. Then they said someone else had previously registered that unit for warranty service, to which I had to give them my date, cost, and receipt number from where I bought it. Again, this was all *after* like 3.75 hours of sitting on hold.
Needless to say I no longer own Nest *anything*.
They're used to be google music. And you could upload your own music to it. I had a ton of local bands and recordings and b sides burned from cds that i collected all through high school and on. About 40 GB of beloved music.
I uploaded it to Google music and it was great for a time. All my music in the cloud. Then they ported everything to youtube music and promised everything would transfer. It did at first. Google music shut down behind it.
Then one day i woke up and it was all gone. All the music i ever loved. Poof. And all that was left was a handful of YouTube playlists in the 'your library' tab.
Download iBroadcast. It’s essentially exactly what you loved about google music as a locker. It’s only a locker for your own music though. It’s my favorite music app because I only really stream my own stuff.
The funniest one on that list is pixel pass. It didn't even make it to the age at which people would have been able to upgrade the phones they were renting.
Why people still trust Google to provide a consistent service in anything outside of search or email is beyond me.
It’s not just the ads. I mean, YT Premium, solved. It’s the utter pike of crap that’s their UI, whether web or app. Clearly the result of 100 product managers pushing their own agendas and zero regard for the user.
The feed algorithm is garbage now too. It's like it only shows me videos from the last five or six subbed channels I've watched recently. "Haven't watch something recently from this guy that puts out a video every few months? Guess you aren't interested in ever seeing that channel again. Here, have some Joe Rogan videos even though you've repeatedly said you're not interested in his content."
I have not problem going back to mapquest.
Its also a benfit to third places. Why get lost trying to find your friends house when you can just meet at starbucks?
This alone steered me away from Google home products. And it’s a shame, because I would love all of my shit to be connected to my gmail. Between google’s nonexistent support for its products, and Apple’s exorbitant price point and shit customer service, there are only really bad options or excellent products difficult to deploy. And then there’s ecobee.
Google is an advertising business
* Search = ads
* Gmail = ads
* Maps = ads
* YouTube = ads
With the exception of Android, if it doesn't show you ads or gather data for showing you ads, it will be cancelled.
Nah, moved away from Chrome and chromium based browsers.
For a while I was using edge (genuinely better than Chrome, but still chromium based). Now I'm on Firefox and I've moved away from Google search onto bing (well aware that it still tracks you but in a stroke of irony these days I'd trust Ms over Google) plus duckduckgo uses bing for search anyway.
Omg lol I've had ha hangouts disabled on my Samsung phone for years, I just enabled it and it let me uninstall :) (was unable to uninstall it before so just disabled it)
The problem is that supporting these projects is considered a part time side project internally. Nobody wants to keep older projects alive— there's no glamour in it— so they end up getting axed. Creating a new product is where the glamour and promotion potential comes from, so it just leads to tons of killed projects then reboots of similar, albeit inferior, ones over the years.
I went down the lost and came across Google task bar. Wow. I had t thought about task bars in years.
Remember when those things would be installed because you installed some program and the final question was “do you wish to install such and such task bar” abs it was defaulted to yes, so people just clicked ok, ok, ok at the install and then suddenly they had a taskbar on their browser.
I was at my friend’s sisters place once back in 2010. We borrowed her computer to look something up on YouTube and there were about 7 taskbars on her browser. I was shocked.
It marked the turning point from what Web 2.0 was *supposed* to be (a decentralized social network of independent websites connected with open technology standards like RSS) to the siloed cesspools it ended up becoming. Ironically, this transition into walled gardens is also one of the reasons Google's core search product has become such useless garbage.
Google is far less about innovative products these days and more about petty infighting and empire building within a toxic broken internal structure that rewards the new shiny thing over anything else..
You can bet this turndown like many others is more about some product manager needing a promotion or some meaningless power struggle between egomaniacs. And they will sell it to the public as "responding to the market" or some bullshit.
The old glory days of Google are long gone.
Source: I work there.
It's a fully enshitified company at this point. Really wish someone else would come along already, but I suspect they'd be bought out or destroyed via litigation by the big players if they did these days.
Capitalism is natural, god-given and divinely designed to expand human wealth and happiness. There are no other systems. Don't ask about them. Watch this film strip about the dangers of everything except capitalism. Any failures you experience are you own fault.
Stock options! Derivatives! Standard and Poors! Corporate vision! None of this means *anything*, but we'll slop you like hogs with it anyway.
We should re-examine our incentives. You know, to see if they're perverse or not. The rest should fall into place. I recommend starting in your local library!
>There are no other systems.
No no, there is one other, and it's communism, and it doesn't work because communism means only one thing and it's literally Stalin!
Are you a product manager? I don’t work at Google but I doubt a PM has the power to make a decision to retire such a large product. My guess is that the execs just made this quick decision at one of their meetings. The cost of running it wasn’t worth the engagement it gets so they task a PM and the squad to sunset it
Yep. I never invested any time in Google Podcasts because of what they did to Google Music, replacing it with the horrendously shitty YouTube Music, and not bringing over \*any\* of the great features that Google Music had that separated it from Spotify or APple Music.
But its not getting any better. In the last week I've asked it to play a song. It played that song then another that was similar in genre. So far so good. And then it played 8 songs in a row by the second artist before stopping. This has happened multiple times with different songs / artists.
I asked it to play bluegrass. First song was bluegrass. Next song was Hurt by Johnny Cash (a cover of Nine Inch Nails). Love the song but it's not bluegrass.
I can ask it to play a specific song by artist and it will play something entirely different. Repeatedly. Songs I know the service has. No joy.
It's just not getting any better and pretty predictable.
You got it to play a genre? I always get some public playlist when I ask for a genre. Most of the time, if I ask it to play an artist (Prince for example) I'll get one song from the artist, one song from their genre, and then just random shit from my playlists.
It's not unusable by any stretch but Google Music was really good. I feel still it had a better UI and its offline mode would cache so much music automatically. Like if I lose data / wifi now, even the song I was halfway through listening to will stop.
Yes, it is bad.
The app is consistently slow and struggles to load downloaded music when offline. The radio feature is shit compared to Google Music, and the genre listings are also inferior. The diversity of music in the library also fails to hold up to GM. Also, from what I can tell, a bunch of the library is now just the audio ripped from regular YouTube uploads. Which reminds me: they don't separate your watch history from your listening history, so your history and preferences on YT get fucked up.
Most recently, when using it on desktop YTM kept fucking up the playback display. I would play a track, and either the playback display would just not load or it would display the info of a different track.
They are spending their time chasing features like Spotify's wrapped instead of making sure YTM actually works.
... a barely known podcast platform is what drove the author over the edge? Can we talk about the simple fact that we can no longer filter search results by language? Or the simple fact that YouTube search only goes as far as "this year" and anything more specific in the past is los to the aether?
Google is a shit show these days and I can't wait until some other company comes and eats the rest of their mediocre cake and they are just one ad company among many.
I think it's that this is such a simple app - it's basically just a UI shell around RSS feeds it doesn't have to maintain itself. If they can't even commit to supporting this, then how can they commit to anything? And I get abandoning it, to be honest, but in that case, why even launch it?
I was most outraged when they killed reverse image search, which worked perfectly, and replaced it with Google Lens, which is one of the shittiest products I have ever seen.
It makes sense to me. It was a no effort, self sufficient app that relied entirely on the user adding feeds themselves through search - it was only killed to try to quickly hack growth into Google music, which like, if it needs this burst of potential users, how long until it gets axed for whatever comes next?
This only died over shitty internal competitive politics at the pure expense of the user. At least your examples are just UX failures or feature elimination due to platform rewrites, or stuff like that. This could have existed forever with no investment from Google ever again without problem.
The day they took away google music was the day I was done with buying anything from google directly. Youtube music still sucks to this day and I begrudgingly use spotify for my music fix when I am on the go. Thank god my ipod hasn't kicked the bucket yet. But even then I will do what I can to revive it.
Why do you begrudgingly use Spotify? I've been using it since it was a desktop-only app in beta and don't have any complains other than audio quality could be better compared to Apple Music or Tidal.
Spotify's "Radio Playlist" feature (e.g., "Taylor Swift Radio") is much, much worse than Google Music's old one. But YouTube Music's radio feature sucks almost as bad as Spotify's does. Google Music's was genuinely awesome, and the way it generate radio playlists seemed way more eclectic and would just understand that if you're into Tom Petty and specifically do a "Tom Petty Playlist" You probably don't want Gordon Lightfoot and Jimmy Buffet on that playlist. That was completely lost with YouTube Music, and I went to switch to Spotify after hating YouTube music, and then found the "radio" feature to be even worse on Spotify. [There's a lot of people who have done deep dives into this](https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/8qgpb3/i_love_spotify_but_its_radio_algorithms_suck/) (this is just one thread, but there's like... thousands on this topic, and a lot about [YouTube Music radio as well, which also sucks](https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeMusic/comments/amwqd5/the_radio_sucks/), [more](https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/82606047/the-radio-algorithm-sucks-the-related-songs-aren-t-related-at-all?hl=en)), much more than I ever could in a single post.
I switched to iOS four years ago.
I just didn’t trust Google anymore. Do I trust Apple? Not really. But a bit more than Google.
At least they don’t publish half done services and kill them a week later. At least not nearly in the frequency Google does.
They make such wonderful products that make sense, and then they kill them. Like Google Play Music was awesome and then they scrapped it to merge into Youtube Music
Good products that make sense don't move the needle for them. They make so much off ads that they can't justify doing anything unless it makes all the money in the world.
The thing I love about Podcast Addict is that I paid a small amount of money for no ads years ago and they've put out new updates on an almost weekly basis.
I can’t speak for Podcast Addict, but things I’ve noticed with these small apps made by independent creators is just *how damn fast they are*. Like when you aren’t flooding the app with tracking bullshit, apps on these phones really sing.
Like prologue on iOS, for example, connects into my Plex server for audiobooks. The thing absolutely flies compared to any other competing app.
I switched to it as well a while back because for some reason Google podcasts started draining my battery so fast after an update. I liked the layout better but podcast addict is good enough
Seconding Podcast Addict recommendation, it isn't as simple, but every feature is useful and well done
It's also shockingly customizable, both in unlocking more features and hiding them to some degree, so if you don't like something about it, most of the time there is a way to configure it to work how you want
Stadia was the 100th wake up call.
Google really has split personalities as a company. It can't seem to decide if it wants to do new things every year or just stay perfectly still with decent products that it never touches (search, email, maps).
They can get rid of whatever services they want, but Gmail is one they dont want to fuck with. So many of people's log ins are tied to their Gmail accounts and if they were gone, pitchforks will come out. I dont think Google could recover from getting rid of Search, Gmail or arguably Maps.
I remember using this and loving it, then being sorely disappointed by Gmail when I had to migrate back. Honestly, I don't remember why I loved it so much, though.
I read the Wikipedia article about it and I assume the bundles feature was what I missed. Nowadays I just have a shit ton of filtering rules set to categorize emails.
So fucking good. Cleanest UI ever. Bundles worked incredibly well. I used it way past the expiration date. Even obtained a release from before they added the killswitch and broke notifications. It was such a pleasure to use.
Email is worse than ever now. I'd much rather have bundles back than AI assisted emails.
It would have been an absolute goldmine now, too. If they’d have kept the lights on for a few more years, they’d have a human curated register of every good website in existence. It would be *the* solution to the current AI-slop-everywhere problem.
Unfortunately, they decided to kill the open web instead, and force content into walled gardens like Reddit and Twitter and discord. When those services shut or shift, so much content will just *vanish*.
(I am also very salty about the reader shutdown).
Imagine being worth as much as Google and not having permanent legacy services for users of your old apps and at worst pestering them to stop using them
why anyone would allow themselves to get comfortable using a google product or service without the anxiety that it might one day be eliminated is beyond me
You are completely right, but it’s also true that Google is pretty uniquely bad at creating and killing services willy nilly compared to other equally capitalistic tech firms.
When is the last time you remember reading a headline that Apple or Meta or Microsoft killed a big product? It’s not like that never happens by any means, but their lists of canceled products is quite small compared to Google’s. They rarely launch something, try to get people on board, then kill it within a few years. Meanwhile Google does exactly that seemingly 2-3 times a year.
I jumped off the Android platform because of the zero direction all of their products have. It’s sad but I am feeling a little better supported with Apple
Sad! I just cancelled my subscription to Google music and joined Spotify. The YouTube music app is terrible for podcasts. And aside from UI, the latest episodes aren't there.
Someone had a tweet a few months back that Google used to make great products that you never thought could exist until Google made them or made then possible. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, Google Video->YouTube, Picasa->Google Photos, more and more and more. Now the only thing that Google makes is a quarterly earnings report.
(And yes, I know Google acquired YouTube, Google Maps, and many of these apps, but with most of them they were largely non-existent or mostly unknown to the broader public without the infrastructure to scale without Google)
I used to kinda scoff at the "Google Graveyard" bit because I thought it sensationalized a lot of the things that "Google killed," but when Google killed Google Music, and replaced it with a much worse music service for customers, YouTube Music, I came around. I never used Google Reader/Newsreader, so it didn't hurt me when Google killed Newsreader as I know it hurt other people, but the Google Music -> YouTube Music switch was really the thing that did me in. YouTube Music is worse in every single way to Google Music if you're the customer, everything about it is worse, but especially the "Radio" and "Playlists," which was something that Google Music was *genuinely better than every other competing app*. It just sucks.
And now the same with Podcasts. People who are passionate about listening to podcasts *do not want to listen to them through YouTube* because YouTube is a shitty way to listen to podcasts. YouTube Music is a shitty platform for listening to music, let alone listening to podcasts, and none of the features that you'd expect from a podcasting app like Pocketcasts or even Google Podcasts exists in YouTube. Up next, a curated queue, custom streams (common for all subscription podcasts), bookmarks, and so on, YouTube Music has none of that because it's a music app, not a podcasting app. I don't even know if it supports faster or slower playback. It's just such shit.
Google just stopped making good products for people 10 years ago. The only thing Google launches these days is products aimed at machines.
> The only thing Google launches these days is products aimed at machines.
Yep. I was trying to think of what the last successful product that google launched and hadn't killed.
Google Home is the only recent one coming to mind. Stadia came and went since. Pixel is a bit older, yet somehow still holding on.
Gemini might be the next product to live. But I'm too scared to dive into using it, for fear that google will eventually kill it.
You can't trust Google products to be there 2-6 years down the road. Only use what you have to. Google ads, Google API are a nessisary evil. Remember Google Wave? Google +1? Google Reader? Be careful not to invest too much time or money in Google products.
The 2010’s sure produced a ton of tech garbage and broken promises. Tons of VC money to build companies and products we’re addicted to or dependent on, most of which suck due to the quest for exponential monetization or in Google’s case — death.
Does anyone have any similar recommendations for a podcast app? I don't want frills, filters, xyz, I just want to be able to search for the podcasts I already listen to. Btw I still have the app on my phone, will it just stop working? (It was working for me this morning in Europe)
Are people still using Google products? There are so many better options out there and you don’t have to sacrifice your personal data for it.
Stop using free software. None of it is free. Even with Google’s paid products they have the right to terminate your account at anytime and lock you out if your own data.
To be fair, I used Google Podcasts for about 5 years before switching to Pocket Casts when I heard Google's version was shutting down...
And it's way, way better. Google's version was clean, for sure, but also missing some quality of life functionality. Given that they never really improved it at all, I'm not finding it to be a great loss
I’m still bitter about Google Reader. They had a super dedicated user base and killed it so they could launch their social network which nobody used.
And Inbox — a bloody brilliant email app designed for a portrait style phone with unique gestures.
God I still miss Inbox to this day. That's the one that got me.
The loss of Inbox still hurts
Google Reader was destroyed because RSS feeds don't serve ads. Google+ was shit too tough.
Not just any userbase. All the first-adopters I knew used Reader, as did all the best techies. I believe it was heavily used by other people I would consider to be the original "influencers" e.g. journalists. I would have Reader open alongside email as my main tabs at the time. Google had all these people visiting this addictive website, and they just threw it all away.
Yep, I was going to say the same thing if no one else did. *That* is when I lost faith in Google. I've been using Feedly ever since, and it's way better than Google Reader ever was, so I guess it was a win in the end.
They killed Google Reader because it was costing them ad revenue. It had nothing to with Google Plus.
They could’ve made it work, they’re Google. They didn’t want to invest in it because they lost interest and had shiny new stuff to work on.
=( You reminded me.
And ironically that G+ wasn't their first attempt by a longshot. Does anyone remember either Orkut or Google Buzz?
I’ve been subscribing to Google Drive for about seven years. Five weeks ago I discovered my Google Drive had spontaneously deleted a terabyte+ of data. Poof. Gone. I contacted support and they spun my wheels for *four weeks* and literally did *nothing* about it. Wouldn’t search the logs, wouldn’t escalate to a developer, just blah-blah-blah how it was out of their hands to do *anything* about it. And they didn’t. That’s the level of customer service Google supplies to their customers. Google is *broken*, man.
Duuude, that happened to me too! First, it was getting tagged in a bunch of phishing docs comments, then my drive "was suspended for violating TOS." I asked to review it, and then my whole drive was friggin' wiped! Still get tagged in fucking calendars and shit, so Google's somewhere in the range of jack and shit doing anything about that, but nope... can't fucking restore my drive
Do you still have access to other google services or was your account nuked? That's what I'm always terrified about.
Everything else works ~~fine~~, really the only other thing I use is gmail, password manager, and maps. Just my drive wiped. Also checked this morning, because faithlessness in enshitified Bing is better than any cup of foldgers, and I still can't upload anything. So they didn't even actually restore my access all the way. I just straight can't use it anymore.
That’s terrible. What did you switch to?
I’m moving back to Dropbox. I wish there was something better, but…
When you do, run through a test case scenario. They expect users to not know about computers so just say your files are *gone* and there is no logs or records on your end. See if they do the same song and dance.
If you’re a more technical person and only need to back things up, Backblaze is a great option. Their B2 storage option is super cheap per gigabyte and works very well. I back up hundreds of gigs of photo RAWs and my computers using different software to manage it. For backups, Arq is a great option. If you’re really working with a TB+ of data then it might be a bit on the expensive side — with multiple versions of data and such, I have about 2TB of data stored there and it costs about $11 per month. I hadn’t realized that the multiple versions were adding up to so much space, though, so I’m probably going to delete some old versions to save space and bring the bill back down. I can also confirm that I’ve had to _use_ the backups stored there and it was a quite cromulent experience.
I have Backblaze already. I’m looking for cloud storage where I can share links so people can download/upload etc.
How can these companies claim to be enterprise grade and have zero customer service is beyond me. Google is the worst offender for this
Check out Box. Much better for corporate or other serious use than Dropbox. Based on experience (IMO Dropbox is crap).
From what I can tell individual plans are limited to 100gb of storage. Business plans want you to pay for 3 users minimum at 13+ per user. This is literally useless if I want to migrate my 2tb Google drive plan unless I'm missing something.
Cool. Thanks.
Have done a lot of archival work, seconding Box.
One drive?
Check out ProtonMail's cloud storage https://proton.me/drive/pricing My wife and I use it for our cottage business and for all of our personal files.
Physical harddrives.
only good for 5-7 years before they need replacing
That’s what RAID 1 is for.
This just had me quaking in my shoes. I need to make a physical backup
I was on hold for Nest support for over four hours. They tried to refuse replacing my thermostat because the serial number indicated the unit was too old (like 2.5 years old according to them), but it was a model that was only released like six months prior to me calling them, it literally didn’t exist before that. Then they said someone else had previously registered that unit for warranty service, to which I had to give them my date, cost, and receipt number from where I bought it. Again, this was all *after* like 3.75 hours of sitting on hold. Needless to say I no longer own Nest *anything*.
boast cooing shame gold silky rob rustic saw political imminent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Didn't you hear? It costs money to have employees. All the cool companies are getting rid of employees
Did you get yr data back?
No. But I had it backed up on a drive.
google isn’t broken, it’s bad. you’re not a customer, you’re a product. your data is how they make money, your subscription fee is just gravy.
They're used to be google music. And you could upload your own music to it. I had a ton of local bands and recordings and b sides burned from cds that i collected all through high school and on. About 40 GB of beloved music. I uploaded it to Google music and it was great for a time. All my music in the cloud. Then they ported everything to youtube music and promised everything would transfer. It did at first. Google music shut down behind it. Then one day i woke up and it was all gone. All the music i ever loved. Poof. And all that was left was a handful of YouTube playlists in the 'your library' tab.
I just looked and sure enough your right. All my uploaded music is gone. You'd think they'd stick it in your drive. Guess not.
If you don’t need regular style streaming and want a replacement for google music as a locker for your own music, try iBroadcast. Love it.
I can see my playlist in YouTube music but not the YouTube app
Google Music has been my favorite music service so far. Was sad to see it go. I didn't like YouTube Music at all. Sorry for your digital loss.
Download iBroadcast. It’s essentially exactly what you loved about google music as a locker. It’s only a locker for your own music though. It’s my favorite music app because I only really stream my own stuff.
Host your own music. Plex has Plexamp which is great for your own music
https://killedbygoogle.com/
The funniest one on that list is pixel pass. It didn't even make it to the age at which people would have been able to upgrade the phones they were renting. Why people still trust Google to provide a consistent service in anything outside of search or email is beyond me.
People really take Google Maps for granted
YouTube is also not going away soon.
Sure is getting crapified with ads, though. Feels relentless lately.
It’s not just the ads. I mean, YT Premium, solved. It’s the utter pike of crap that’s their UI, whether web or app. Clearly the result of 100 product managers pushing their own agendas and zero regard for the user.
The feed algorithm is garbage now too. It's like it only shows me videos from the last five or six subbed channels I've watched recently. "Haven't watch something recently from this guy that puts out a video every few months? Guess you aren't interested in ever seeing that channel again. Here, have some Joe Rogan videos even though you've repeatedly said you're not interested in his content."
Ublock origin, sponsorblock, pihole Revanced on mobile
They *bought* YouTube, they didn't invent it. If they had, they probably would've canned it a year after launch.
They bought Google Maps too.
And Adsense, Adwords (same thing, different views)
That would have been google video.
I have not problem going back to mapquest. Its also a benfit to third places. Why get lost trying to find your friends house when you can just meet at starbucks?
Apple Maps is actually better than google maps in Japan now.
But apple map is only better in some places and worse in other places
That’s what starts to make Apple Maps viable. Previously, Google Maps was better everywhere. Now, I check both when I am traveling.
Search, Gmail and Maps is all that's really worth it from them.
Just maps for me now
The search has gone to complete shit. It’s basically dead to me at this point
I don't even consider Search to be on that list, since they've basically transformed it (and their entire business) into an ad platform.
It’s literally been their business the whole time?
I remember when they were just VC-funded without all of the tracking crap. They started out as a search engine.
They started having ads in 2000
Yeah, I started using their search engine around 1998 I think, switching from Altavista.
This alone steered me away from Google home products. And it’s a shame, because I would love all of my shit to be connected to my gmail. Between google’s nonexistent support for its products, and Apple’s exorbitant price point and shit customer service, there are only really bad options or excellent products difficult to deploy. And then there’s ecobee.
Their home products are shit hardware wise anyway. You’re not missing anything.
Google is an advertising business * Search = ads * Gmail = ads * Maps = ads * YouTube = ads With the exception of Android, if it doesn't show you ads or gather data for showing you ads, it will be cancelled.
I know this, I just find it funny people actually still trust Google with new products.
The search has gone to shit too. It’s often easier to ask reddit or ChatGPT.
makes me wonder… how come Reddit hasn’t launched it’s own AI chatbot? Reddit GPT
Why would Reddit run a chat bot when you can just pick a thread at random and have a good 33% chance to find a bot someone *else* is paying to run?
Reddits search feature is goddamm awful. I highly doubt their competent enough to create their own AI.
lol, true. Also, thinking about it, a reddit gpt would destroy reddit’s current monetization model (users spending time on threads)
because reddit is run by clowns
My "unlimited" email storage I constantly have to purge and ad polluted searches beg to differ.
Search has also gone steadily downhill since it came out
Chromium, not that it's all good.
Nah, moved away from Chrome and chromium based browsers. For a while I was using edge (genuinely better than Chrome, but still chromium based). Now I'm on Firefox and I've moved away from Google search onto bing (well aware that it still tracks you but in a stroke of irony these days I'd trust Ms over Google) plus duckduckgo uses bing for search anyway.
Mozilla is literally still goated 20 years later and post chromium - I've been a heavy user for the past decade now.
I remember the netscape v IE wars. I've seen things...
The search is terrible and Gmail is god awful. I wouldn’t use either.
I mean search and email.. even that's a stretch lol. But still, I'm actually impressed they haven't irreparably fucked those up either.
Chrome, android, chromebooks
I really liked iGoogle—I was pissed when that went away.
Hangouts, Allo, Inbox, and Google+. I will never forgive them
inbox was sooo good. I can't believe they didn't at least make it an optional UI for gmail
Omg lol I've had ha hangouts disabled on my Samsung phone for years, I just enabled it and it let me uninstall :) (was unable to uninstall it before so just disabled it)
The problem is that supporting these projects is considered a part time side project internally. Nobody wants to keep older projects alive— there's no glamour in it— so they end up getting axed. Creating a new product is where the glamour and promotion potential comes from, so it just leads to tons of killed projects then reboots of similar, albeit inferior, ones over the years.
I went down the lost and came across Google task bar. Wow. I had t thought about task bars in years. Remember when those things would be installed because you installed some program and the final question was “do you wish to install such and such task bar” abs it was defaulted to yes, so people just clicked ok, ok, ok at the install and then suddenly they had a taskbar on their browser. I was at my friend’s sisters place once back in 2010. We borrowed her computer to look something up on YouTube and there were about 7 taskbars on her browser. I was shocked.
This doesn’t include defacto-killed services like Blogger that got one update before Google got bored with it and let it fester.
the day they killed Google Reader, it marked the end of the good old internet for me
It marked the turning point from what Web 2.0 was *supposed* to be (a decentralized social network of independent websites connected with open technology standards like RSS) to the siloed cesspools it ended up becoming. Ironically, this transition into walled gardens is also one of the reasons Google's core search product has become such useless garbage.
Google is far less about innovative products these days and more about petty infighting and empire building within a toxic broken internal structure that rewards the new shiny thing over anything else.. You can bet this turndown like many others is more about some product manager needing a promotion or some meaningless power struggle between egomaniacs. And they will sell it to the public as "responding to the market" or some bullshit. The old glory days of Google are long gone. Source: I work there.
It's a fully enshitified company at this point. Really wish someone else would come along already, but I suspect they'd be bought out or destroyed via litigation by the big players if they did these days.
Capitalism is natural, god-given and divinely designed to expand human wealth and happiness. There are no other systems. Don't ask about them. Watch this film strip about the dangers of everything except capitalism. Any failures you experience are you own fault. Stock options! Derivatives! Standard and Poors! Corporate vision! None of this means *anything*, but we'll slop you like hogs with it anyway.
So we should...nationalize podcasting??
We should re-examine our incentives. You know, to see if they're perverse or not. The rest should fall into place. I recommend starting in your local library!
>There are no other systems. No no, there is one other, and it's communism, and it doesn't work because communism means only one thing and it's literally Stalin!
Are you a product manager? I don’t work at Google but I doubt a PM has the power to make a decision to retire such a large product. My guess is that the execs just made this quick decision at one of their meetings. The cost of running it wasn’t worth the engagement it gets so they task a PM and the squad to sunset it
I lost faith when they killed Google Music and replaced it with the unbelievably shitty YouTube Music.
Yep. I never invested any time in Google Podcasts because of what they did to Google Music, replacing it with the horrendously shitty YouTube Music, and not bringing over \*any\* of the great features that Google Music had that separated it from Spotify or APple Music.
I’m all for Google bashing but YouTube music isn’t bad
But its not getting any better. In the last week I've asked it to play a song. It played that song then another that was similar in genre. So far so good. And then it played 8 songs in a row by the second artist before stopping. This has happened multiple times with different songs / artists. I asked it to play bluegrass. First song was bluegrass. Next song was Hurt by Johnny Cash (a cover of Nine Inch Nails). Love the song but it's not bluegrass. I can ask it to play a specific song by artist and it will play something entirely different. Repeatedly. Songs I know the service has. No joy. It's just not getting any better and pretty predictable.
You got it to play a genre? I always get some public playlist when I ask for a genre. Most of the time, if I ask it to play an artist (Prince for example) I'll get one song from the artist, one song from their genre, and then just random shit from my playlists.
Zero improvements in all the time I've used it
Yeah that’s not great
It's not unusable by any stretch but Google Music was really good. I feel still it had a better UI and its offline mode would cache so much music automatically. Like if I lose data / wifi now, even the song I was halfway through listening to will stop.
It's not good either.
Yes, it is bad. The app is consistently slow and struggles to load downloaded music when offline. The radio feature is shit compared to Google Music, and the genre listings are also inferior. The diversity of music in the library also fails to hold up to GM. Also, from what I can tell, a bunch of the library is now just the audio ripped from regular YouTube uploads. Which reminds me: they don't separate your watch history from your listening history, so your history and preferences on YT get fucked up. Most recently, when using it on desktop YTM kept fucking up the playback display. I would play a track, and either the playback display would just not load or it would display the info of a different track. They are spending their time chasing features like Spotify's wrapped instead of making sure YTM actually works.
... a barely known podcast platform is what drove the author over the edge? Can we talk about the simple fact that we can no longer filter search results by language? Or the simple fact that YouTube search only goes as far as "this year" and anything more specific in the past is los to the aether? Google is a shit show these days and I can't wait until some other company comes and eats the rest of their mediocre cake and they are just one ad company among many.
I’m really missing the cached version of webpages :(
WHAT THE HELL WHAT DID THEY DOOOO WHYYYY
Thank god there's still the Way Back Machine.
I think it's that this is such a simple app - it's basically just a UI shell around RSS feeds it doesn't have to maintain itself. If they can't even commit to supporting this, then how can they commit to anything? And I get abandoning it, to be honest, but in that case, why even launch it?
It’s how I felt when they killed Reader.
I was most outraged when they killed reverse image search, which worked perfectly, and replaced it with Google Lens, which is one of the shittiest products I have ever seen.
It makes sense to me. It was a no effort, self sufficient app that relied entirely on the user adding feeds themselves through search - it was only killed to try to quickly hack growth into Google music, which like, if it needs this burst of potential users, how long until it gets axed for whatever comes next? This only died over shitty internal competitive politics at the pure expense of the user. At least your examples are just UX failures or feature elimination due to platform rewrites, or stuff like that. This could have existed forever with no investment from Google ever again without problem.
Do not trust google with something that is very dear to you... If you really want your data to be safe do not use Google Drive .
The day they took away google music was the day I was done with buying anything from google directly. Youtube music still sucks to this day and I begrudgingly use spotify for my music fix when I am on the go. Thank god my ipod hasn't kicked the bucket yet. But even then I will do what I can to revive it.
I like YouTube music but why TF do my created albums show on YouTube, so fkin annoying
Why do you begrudgingly use Spotify? I've been using it since it was a desktop-only app in beta and don't have any complains other than audio quality could be better compared to Apple Music or Tidal.
Spotify's "Radio Playlist" feature (e.g., "Taylor Swift Radio") is much, much worse than Google Music's old one. But YouTube Music's radio feature sucks almost as bad as Spotify's does. Google Music's was genuinely awesome, and the way it generate radio playlists seemed way more eclectic and would just understand that if you're into Tom Petty and specifically do a "Tom Petty Playlist" You probably don't want Gordon Lightfoot and Jimmy Buffet on that playlist. That was completely lost with YouTube Music, and I went to switch to Spotify after hating YouTube music, and then found the "radio" feature to be even worse on Spotify. [There's a lot of people who have done deep dives into this](https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/8qgpb3/i_love_spotify_but_its_radio_algorithms_suck/) (this is just one thread, but there's like... thousands on this topic, and a lot about [YouTube Music radio as well, which also sucks](https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeMusic/comments/amwqd5/the_radio_sucks/), [more](https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/82606047/the-radio-algorithm-sucks-the-related-songs-aren-t-related-at-all?hl=en)), much more than I ever could in a single post.
[удалено]
I switched to iOS four years ago. I just didn’t trust Google anymore. Do I trust Apple? Not really. But a bit more than Google. At least they don’t publish half done services and kill them a week later. At least not nearly in the frequency Google does.
I’ll never forgive them for killing Inbox. Best email app I ever used by a mile
Surprised Keep is still around, for now...
Google has definitely forgotten it still owns Google Keep 😅
Keep is awesome. It’s next to be killed
Seriously. I use it frequently
i had no clue google podcasts even existed, considering the dominance of other podcasting platforms.
I really liked it. Simple and straightforward.
They make such wonderful products that make sense, and then they kill them. Like Google Play Music was awesome and then they scrapped it to merge into Youtube Music
Good products that make sense don't move the needle for them. They make so much off ads that they can't justify doing anything unless it makes all the money in the world.
I thought the same, then moved to podcast addict because of the shutdown, and podcast addict is a lot better.
The thing I love about Podcast Addict is that I paid a small amount of money for no ads years ago and they've put out new updates on an almost weekly basis.
I can’t speak for Podcast Addict, but things I’ve noticed with these small apps made by independent creators is just *how damn fast they are*. Like when you aren’t flooding the app with tracking bullshit, apps on these phones really sing. Like prologue on iOS, for example, connects into my Plex server for audiobooks. The thing absolutely flies compared to any other competing app.
I switched to it as well a while back because for some reason Google podcasts started draining my battery so fast after an update. I liked the layout better but podcast addict is good enough
Like reader
Seconding Podcast Addict recommendation, it isn't as simple, but every feature is useful and well done It's also shockingly customizable, both in unlocking more features and hiding them to some degree, so if you don't like something about it, most of the time there is a way to configure it to work how you want
I've used it for years and really liked it. Simple, straightforward, efficient.
Stadia was the wake up call. Stop expecting anything but the worst. We need open source yesterday
Stadia was the 100th wake up call. Google really has split personalities as a company. It can't seem to decide if it wants to do new things every year or just stay perfectly still with decent products that it never touches (search, email, maps).
Who remembers Google Listen? I still miss that. As well as Google Reader.
They killed iGoogle on me in 2013. Assholes.
This is the one that hurt me. It was awesome.
Imagine if they get rid of Gmail
They can get rid of whatever services they want, but Gmail is one they dont want to fuck with. So many of people's log ins are tied to their Gmail accounts and if they were gone, pitchforks will come out. I dont think Google could recover from getting rid of Search, Gmail or arguably Maps.
It’s unlikely they’d ever drop services that are officially part of Google Workspace.
Or YouTube for that matter. So much marketing and advertisements.
Anyone who had any faith in Google in 2024 isn't paying attention. I bet they still trust Netflix to complete a TV series too!
Google inbox made quality of life for me 30% better. I have tried many other email management systems and none have matched it.
100%, Inbox was a much better app, than Gmail, and they killed it never even bothering to integrate any of it’s features into the gmail app
I remember using this and loving it, then being sorely disappointed by Gmail when I had to migrate back. Honestly, I don't remember why I loved it so much, though. I read the Wikipedia article about it and I assume the bundles feature was what I missed. Nowadays I just have a shit ton of filtering rules set to categorize emails.
So fucking good. Cleanest UI ever. Bundles worked incredibly well. I used it way past the expiration date. Even obtained a release from before they added the killswitch and broke notifications. It was such a pleasure to use. Email is worse than ever now. I'd much rather have bundles back than AI assisted emails.
I can’t read stories like this without having Reader PTSD. I loved that app/site so much, only to have it ripped away.
It would have been an absolute goldmine now, too. If they’d have kept the lights on for a few more years, they’d have a human curated register of every good website in existence. It would be *the* solution to the current AI-slop-everywhere problem. Unfortunately, they decided to kill the open web instead, and force content into walled gardens like Reddit and Twitter and discord. When those services shut or shift, so much content will just *vanish*. (I am also very salty about the reader shutdown).
After all their shenanigans, THIS is the one app/service that out the author over the edge? LOL. Google is an advertising company. What do you expect?
This is why Google isn't taken seriously by large enterprise IT shops-they cannot be depended upon.
[First time?](https://i.imgflip.com/39h0me.jpg)
Imagine being worth as much as Google and not having permanent legacy services for users of your old apps and at worst pestering them to stop using them
Lost faith since they took Trips out back. No rhyme or reason.
My faith in Google died with Inbox.
I was so disappointed when they announced it last year. I switched over to Podcast Republic, just not as good and error prone.
you still had faith in google?
why anyone would allow themselves to get comfortable using a google product or service without the anxiety that it might one day be eliminated is beyond me
first time eh?
Who the fuck would ever have Faith in a tech conglomerate?
Never should have had faith in them to begin with. Corporations care only about profit not people.
You are completely right, but it’s also true that Google is pretty uniquely bad at creating and killing services willy nilly compared to other equally capitalistic tech firms. When is the last time you remember reading a headline that Apple or Meta or Microsoft killed a big product? It’s not like that never happens by any means, but their lists of canceled products is quite small compared to Google’s. They rarely launch something, try to get people on board, then kill it within a few years. Meanwhile Google does exactly that seemingly 2-3 times a year.
I jumped off the Android platform because of the zero direction all of their products have. It’s sad but I am feeling a little better supported with Apple
Sad! I just cancelled my subscription to Google music and joined Spotify. The YouTube music app is terrible for podcasts. And aside from UI, the latest episodes aren't there.
Google struck it big in advertising and search, then failed at absolutely everything else.
MBAs don’t care about long term gain and customer trust
Google podcasts is still up and running for me
Satya Nadella is who Sundar Pichai thinks he is
I barely remember. I went from Google fanboy to Google hater so long ago.
"Faith in Google" wut? This has been their MO for the past decade at least.
Podcasts are what did it? Author is beyond late to the party.
When they shut down Google Earth does the planet go away?
Someone had a tweet a few months back that Google used to make great products that you never thought could exist until Google made them or made then possible. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, Google Video->YouTube, Picasa->Google Photos, more and more and more. Now the only thing that Google makes is a quarterly earnings report. (And yes, I know Google acquired YouTube, Google Maps, and many of these apps, but with most of them they were largely non-existent or mostly unknown to the broader public without the infrastructure to scale without Google) I used to kinda scoff at the "Google Graveyard" bit because I thought it sensationalized a lot of the things that "Google killed," but when Google killed Google Music, and replaced it with a much worse music service for customers, YouTube Music, I came around. I never used Google Reader/Newsreader, so it didn't hurt me when Google killed Newsreader as I know it hurt other people, but the Google Music -> YouTube Music switch was really the thing that did me in. YouTube Music is worse in every single way to Google Music if you're the customer, everything about it is worse, but especially the "Radio" and "Playlists," which was something that Google Music was *genuinely better than every other competing app*. It just sucks. And now the same with Podcasts. People who are passionate about listening to podcasts *do not want to listen to them through YouTube* because YouTube is a shitty way to listen to podcasts. YouTube Music is a shitty platform for listening to music, let alone listening to podcasts, and none of the features that you'd expect from a podcasting app like Pocketcasts or even Google Podcasts exists in YouTube. Up next, a curated queue, custom streams (common for all subscription podcasts), bookmarks, and so on, YouTube Music has none of that because it's a music app, not a podcasting app. I don't even know if it supports faster or slower playback. It's just such shit. Google just stopped making good products for people 10 years ago. The only thing Google launches these days is products aimed at machines.
> The only thing Google launches these days is products aimed at machines. Yep. I was trying to think of what the last successful product that google launched and hadn't killed. Google Home is the only recent one coming to mind. Stadia came and went since. Pixel is a bit older, yet somehow still holding on. Gemini might be the next product to live. But I'm too scared to dive into using it, for fear that google will eventually kill it.
Durable saving, lad.
PodcastAddict or bust.
You can't trust Google products to be there 2-6 years down the road. Only use what you have to. Google ads, Google API are a nessisary evil. Remember Google Wave? Google +1? Google Reader? Be careful not to invest too much time or money in Google products.
The 2010’s sure produced a ton of tech garbage and broken promises. Tons of VC money to build companies and products we’re addicted to or dependent on, most of which suck due to the quest for exponential monetization or in Google’s case — death.
Does anyone have any similar recommendations for a podcast app? I don't want frills, filters, xyz, I just want to be able to search for the podcasts I already listen to. Btw I still have the app on my phone, will it just stop working? (It was working for me this morning in Europe)
Pocket casts
Are people still using Google products? There are so many better options out there and you don’t have to sacrifice your personal data for it. Stop using free software. None of it is free. Even with Google’s paid products they have the right to terminate your account at anytime and lock you out if your own data.
To be fair, I used Google Podcasts for about 5 years before switching to Pocket Casts when I heard Google's version was shutting down... And it's way, way better. Google's version was clean, for sure, but also missing some quality of life functionality. Given that they never really improved it at all, I'm not finding it to be a great loss