10 Decisions From Google That Make You Wonder, “What Were They Thinking?“
Google’s 23rd birthday is today, September 4, as the company was launched on this day in 1998 in Silicon Valley. Since then it has grown from a simple webpage to a large internet that is ubiquitous, though it certainly has no other hurdles along the way. The company has made incredibly good decisions over the years, from product launch to the launch and launch of one million different messaging services. While there are probably a lot of decisions from the web giant that make you wonder “why?”, Here are ten of them that make us go “What did they really think?”.
10: Google Glass
Launching our list is Google Glass, a clever spectacle of the future that seems to delight the entire media cycle for a short time when it is announced. The future, based on science fiction, Google Glass was a clever mirror that was launched in 2013. They came with a high price tag of $ 1500, and they never saw the commercial success that the company might have wanted. Between private concerns and limited use cases, it has never really gone away. The MyGlass app used for pairing and editing Google Glass was released in the Google Play Store last year.
However, Google Glass was not a complete failure. It was used, especially in medicine, and was also used as an attempt to help children with autism. Although not a case of use found in all medical fields, there has been a development of ideas that could lay the foundation for future technological advances.
9: Google Stadia
Google Stadia is not so much a mistake as it is a sign of a big question in Google’s timeline release. Gaming access did not seem to be Google’s style, and while the service is good, it has a lot of environmental issues that you have to deal with, you need to meet three ways to be able to play Stadia. While you may have a relatively low latency connection, it is probably not fast enough to use game streaming services. Maybe it’s fast enough, but you live too far away from your nearest data center. In addition, if you use Stadia primarily in game streaming to avoid downloading games because that takes too long, your internet may not be able to manage Stadia in the first place.
I enjoy using Stadia, but there are a large number of questions around it that cause concern for its performance.
8: Google Allo and Google messaging apps graves
Google and messaging services are a combination that always produces exciting results. We have seen the arrival and departure of Google Talk, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, and many other random messaging services from the company over the years. Then there is the tendency when a company has to bake message messages in applications and services that do not require instant messaging. While the messaging service (obviously) makes sense, it seems that Google is also ultimately killing whatever it submits. No full expansion is required here; we are all aware of Google’s tendency to kill services.
7: Pill wandering
Do you remember that Google introduced tablet navigation with Android Pie? Disappeared as soon as it arrived, it was killed by Android 10 on Google Pixel 4 with the love of full screen touch. The post was then made on the Android Developers blog explaining why Google has come up with a touch we have now with tablet navigation, and I personally believe that many Android fans are happy with the current performance over the two-button tablet navigation. The two-button pill was measurable and medium, for the first time.
6: Goodbye to Google Play Music, hello to YouTube Music
The decision to assassinate Google Play Music was ridiculous, not because no one was going to replace him directly. Set as the default music player for Android, it was the only pre-installed “out of the box” way to play local music files on your phone storage on most smartphones. While YouTube Music is a great service, Google Play Music also, especially as it allows you to download 50,000 of your MP3 songs for free to stream on any of your devices. You can transfer everything to YouTube Music if you want, but there is no other local music player on Android. Not to mention, YouTube Music has a number of drawbacks, such as not allowing closed user play for free. If you want to listen to music (and not watch every second of the sound playing on your phone along the way), you should trust your device maker to create his own music player. Honestly, we probably have this moment.
5: Google’s re-enlargement
Google’s great revival has made many people wonder what the point of all the work is. Services with their own unique identity and personality have been replaced by colors and designs with Google features, resulting in almost everything that looks almost identical. Understandably, the company wants to have a certain brand of the same product… but it certainly makes it difficult to tell the difference between them at a glance. Improved ownership from each service and made it difficult for anyone deep into the Google ecosystem to tell the difference between them all. It’s not such a “mistake”, but it certainly scratches you as to why the company sees this change as necessary.
4: Nexus line killing
Google Nexus 5 has been my introduction to ROMs and modeling, which I followed later when I bought the OnePlus 3. The Nexus line for smartphones was the “Google” you can get for Android, and it was mainly aimed at developers. However, that did not stop ordinary users from buying one to get real Android information. While the Nexus line was linked to the Pixel line, it was a sign of Google’s normal movement, as Google’s smartphones were no longer just subject to developers.
The Nexus line is dead with the Nexus 6P, a phone made by Google through Huawei. It had bootlooping problems (next to the Nexus 5X) and eventually ended up when Google paid checks as a result of the action. There has been no Nexus phone since then, and it is unlikely that there will be another one.
3: Android One and Google Play Edition
Did you know that the Android One app is still alive and kicking? You will probably be forgiven for thinking it is dead, given that Google does not even seem to be updating the Android One page. The recently released Nokia XR20 smartphone is actually an Android One app, although we haven’t heard much about the program in years. Xiaomi’s Mi A series was widely regarded as the bearer of the Android One flashlights, although HMD Global has also been an avid supporter of the program for years. The Android One app is amazingly reminiscent of the Nexus line – close-to-stock Android and instant updates.
Surprisingly, however, the home page of the Android One site still claims that Android 10 is the “latest” Android app. To further confuse the problem, Nokia 5.3 recently received an update to Android 11… where Android One devices should receive updates faster than any other competition. Device rolls have dropped again – over the past two years, only one device in the system has been unveiled by Nokia and HMD Global, and a total of only four devices have been released this year as part of the program. Android One isn’t really dead, but there’s definitely something wrong with it.
As for Google Play Edition, it was a great program to buy devices with official Google support. The HTC One M8 is a very popular model; you can buy it on HTC with the company’s SenseUI, or buy it on the Google Play store with a lot of “stock” Android. They had unlocked bootloaders, and the Samsung Galaxy S4 at the time was available under similar conditions. The media who translated with Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S5 even leaked at that time, although it was never in the body and the app was recently executed.
2: Future Pixels will not have free storage for Google Photos
I still have trouble wrapping my head – why would future Google Pixel devices, at least, have free Google Photos storage? The advantage of original Pixels is that you can save all your photos for real quality for free, even if they are shot a little later. Google has confirmed that older Pixels can still save “life” photos for free in a compressed format in Google Photos, but future devices will not find them.
Given that Google likes to push the thinking power of Pixels, you think they’ll throw as much as they can to make them attractive and give people another reason to get Pixel. Google Photos is a service most people rely on, and a lifetime of free compressed uploads would be a good thing if you paired it with Google Pixel purchases. But alas, there will be no more.
1: Google+
The Google+ story is funny and is one of the few times Google has shown that a company may not be at its core. It struggled for years, and following a major data breach, the company decided it should never work again.
In context: there was a bug in the Google+ People APIs, which may have revealed more than 500,000 user data and was immediately announced in March 2018. This, combined with a very low user base – 90% of Google+ times in less than 5 seconds – was enough that Google has done so well. While Google initially provided a timeline of closure for about ten months, it decided to speed up the closure when another data leak affected 52.5 million users who could have personal profile information disclosed to the developer.
To make matters worse, Google has tried hard to push Google+ to users, even integrating the YouTube comment section directly into the social network. Anyone who commented on YouTube was required to have a Google+ account, even if you never used it. While some people enjoy using a social network, it is almost just another social network that has no major reason to exist.