Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.
I know, I know, using Google apps isn’t the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.
Apparently they’re moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts aren’t implemented yet.
I’ve moved over to an app from F-Droid.
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?
I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.
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.
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
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+)
Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing “inbox” into the address bar to get to my emails.