Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.
I know, I know, using Google apps isnโt the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.
Apparently theyโre moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts arenโt implemented yet.
Iโve moved over to an app from F-Droid.
I donโt really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.
Iโm 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 managerโs daily musings that drive what development does?
Itโs a company culture thing. Youโre not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.
Youโre not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products.
No kidding.
It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still canโt 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. Itโs back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!
Oh youโre not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phoneโs browser. I dare you.
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on โimpactโ. 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 arenโt supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isnโt always seen as impactful, unless itโs 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 youโre using a free service, youโre 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 donโt drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
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 โ 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 weโve 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 โ 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 itโs going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.
They have an agenda, which isnโt 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 wonโt be mystified by their decisions anymore.
Iโve 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 itโs done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.
It would certainly explain a lot.
Try AntennaPod, itโs on F-Droid
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 wonโt or will stop supporting โlegacyโ Android Auto apps, so AA dies โbecause developers arenโt supporting apps anymore โ totally not our fault and weโre sorry to see this happen.โ
Iโm kind of into Podscast Addict. Not sure how it compares, but its pretty good.
R.I.P.
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.
Pixel Pass
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.
Well, that seems particularly scummy.
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.
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.
๐๐ผ๐๐ผ๐๐ผ
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.
I donโt 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 Googleโs euthanasia project:
- YouTube
- Google Search
- Chrome
- โcoreโ 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 canโt fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays itโs simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.
I just ignore any new Google service these days. Unreliability isnโt even as much of a concern as privacy.
Google music, Google+, Google Spaces, they even killed Google Cache recently - which was a fantastic way to get around my workโs brain-dead decision to block the company (including IT) from reaching Reddit.
Maybe try Redlib for accessing Reddit. You can also use LibRedirect to automatically redirect Reddit links.
Alternatively, use this guide to create a Cloudflare proxy for any website you want to visit that is blocked
