It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.

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.

I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.

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.

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.

One of the best apps on any platform

One of my favorite podcast app.

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.

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 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.

Google music, Google+, Google Spaces, they even killed Google Cache recently - which was a fantastic way to get around my work's brain-dead decision to block the company (including IT) from reaching Reddit.

That's my go to, FOSS app that rivals the major apps.

There are other podcast apps on F-Droid also.

Yeah, that's where I ended up, too. At least Google had the decency to support OPML export so I didn't have to redo my subscriptions manually.

Friendly reminder that YouTube Music laid off an entire team of 43 unionized workers the very moment two of them went before the Austin City Council to ask them to help pressure Google execs to come to the bargaining table to provide them with fair pay and benefits.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://fortune.com/2024/03/09/youtube-music-google-unionized-workers-terminated-contract-austin-outsourcing-india

They finally open sourced the app, but for some reason, they can't figure out how to submit it to F-Droid. This is so annoying.

https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/2236

I wish it was open source and not filled with trackers

As long as that's the case, I'll definitely continue using AntennaPod