I used to run everything Google: had an OnHub, then a set of Nest WiFi pucks, my domains were in Google Domains, my Photos in Google Photos, have a bunch of Nest cameras and other IoT stuff, Stadia, etc.
They started by killing my OnHub, suddenly it wasn't good enough to operate as just another Nest puck. I moved off that. They killed Stadia, OK fair enough. Surprisingly, they killed my Nest Guard system too, now I have to move on to some third party they partnered with. Half of my cameras don't work as expected in the Home app, only the "new" ones do. Then they killed Domains for whatever reason.
I don't think I'll be paying for any new Google products any time soon.
When the cameras and smoke detectors stop working, I'll move on to something else. Unifi perhaps?
I recommend the $30 smoke detector puck from the hardware store. It will work for its designed 10-year lifetime, after which you can buy another one to replace it. No drama.
Are those the shitty ones that indicate an empty battery by beeping a single beep once every five minutes? I think I took a baseball bat to the last one I had.
Those things drive me nuts. It's always a single beep, which isn't enough to locate which one it is. And for some fucked up reason they always start doing that shit right when you're about to fall a sleep.
I happily spent hundreds of euros on Nest Protects just because of the sensible early warning of an empty battery. My sanity is easily worth that.
You mean the ones that have existed for literal decades and still work to this day? Cry me a river because a single beep ruins your mood for 5 minutes, it's probably better than your house burning down.
Yes, I mean those ones! The ones that end up in a closet somewhere because nobody replaces batteries in the middle of the night and the next morning you can't find the right batteries anyway.
They trigger independently and full-force at the same smoke level as the other types. That's a standardized and regulated level. It also sends notifications to your phone, but the primary alert is a god awful amount of noise. As it should be.
But before that standardized amd regulated level, there's a lower early warning level. If it detects a small amount of smoke, it gives an early warning. That warning is just a voice (still pretty loud!) and a phone notification that tells you about it.
The same goes for the batteries. It starts with a message to your phone and the led color. It will get louder after a while, but there's plenty of pre-warning to order new batteries and replace them before that. And all while you're awake anyway.
They do it when you're falling asleep for a reason, though not designed deliberately that way. The reason is that the voltage drops when it's colder, so you're much more likely to get those low battery smoke alarms at night in the winter.
That’s a bit hysterical. I mean are you living in a mansion that has hundreds of these things? I think there were three or two in my 5 bedroom house growing up.
It takes about two or three replacement cycles before you recognize it as the tell-tale signs of smoke detector.
I had only one the first time I had to deal with it. But since these bullshit things beep once and then go silent, it takes forever to figure that out.
Me: sfalling asleep, enjoying the slow decline into unconsciousness
Smoke detector: beep
Me: What was that? Listens intently.
SM: silence
Me: Maybe be my imagination.
SM: silence
Me: Guess it's my imagination. Let's go to sleep again.
SM: beep
Me: No, that was real. What is that?
SM: silence
Me: Where did it come from?
SM: silence
Me: Oh, I guess it stopped. Weird.
SM: beep
Me: Or not. Still not sure where that came from.
This might repeat a few times, depending on how comfortable the bed is and how cold the house is.
SM: beep
Me: Fucking hell, this doesn't stop. Goddamnit. Guess I have to get up.
SM: silence
Me: Thoroughly annoyed and groggy from interrupted sleep.
SM: silence
Me: ...
SM: beep
Me: other side of the house
SM: silence
Me: boiling
SM: silence
Me: stopped?
SM: silence
Me: stopped.
SM: beep
Me: Goddamnit.
SM: silence
Me: Thoroughly ready to go to bed.
SM: silence
Me: ...
SM: beep
Me: starting to have a theory of where it comes from.
SM: silence
Me: beep, you motherfucker, I need to know it was you
SM: silence
Me: Is it taking longer to beep? It didn't stop now, did it?
SM: silence
Me: Come ON!
SM: beep
Me: Got it. Where's the ladder...?
Me: Gets the thing removed from the ceiling.
Me: Removes the battery, and throws the damn thing somewhere I may or may not see it in the morning.
Yes, the very same! The trick is to just replace them all when one starts to go. No need to run around locating the beeping one, just take them all down (you can stop and go to bed when you do find the right one) and replace them all next time you swing by the hardware store.
Modern smoke detectors have a service lifetime of about ten years, and won't work as well after that. So an expired one will keep beeping even after you change the battery. As a result, some don't even come with replaceable batteries.
I went all in with Nest Protect. Then a few months later they killed Nest Guard. Now I look at my Protects with trepidation. They wouldn't kill smoke detectors, right? They have to support those for years, right? We shall see.
I went all in on $30 pucks. They sit on the walls doing whatever it is that they do, and I never think about them. I'll replace them when they start doing the low-battery-chirp thing in 8-10 years.
Most of the time no-tech solutions are the most appropriate ones.
Imagine if your cloud smoke detector went offline and it didn't trigger because it needed a specialized non-local AI to reliably determine there's a fire.
> Imagine if your cloud smoke detector went offline and it didn't trigger because it needed a specialized non-local AI to reliably determine there's a fire.
That would be a dumb product decision to make.
Nest Protect complains about the smallest things, from connectivity (which does not affect detection, by the way), to battery, to positioning, and so far I have been reliably notified in the app.
On the other hand, I did have plain smoke detectors before my Nest ones, and at least one was completely dead for a year without no one knowing.
Those are terrible IMO. I've been through several that were tripping false alarms. You can't take the battery out and deal with it later, you have to throw the "break irreparably" switch.
I prefer the cheap ones that take a 9V battery. You can take them apart and actually dust them.
I do think that Nest Protect adds some value over plain smoke detectors, e.g. I don't need to worry about them going nuts in the middle of the night, and I can tell if there is smoke in the house while I'm away.
When I was looking at a security system (and new WiFi mesh system), this is why I went with Ring and Eero. Amazon is many things, but they rarely shut down products AND they have a proven track record of iterating and making things better over time. Ring and Eero have proven to be resilient, work well, and be slowly improved.
> Amazon is many things, but they rarely shut down products...
They did kill Halo and the Fire Phone. I own a couple of Blink cameras, and they killed the free tier as well.
Also, it's hard to trust Amazon with my security system, when they recently admitted to hand camera data to law enforcement without owner's consent [0]
True, and I guess they've promised to keep renewals at the same price for a year after that. After that they're (currently) notably more expensive, though, and I don't have any interest in being upsold on anything else Squarespace offers, so...
Cloudflare has been promising to add support for all the missing TLDs for years, but seemingly just forgot about the product entirely. And I don't mean esoteric new endings, but mere country TLDs (e.g. `.de`).
Google might be outright killing stuff, but Cloudflare moves from one interesting thing to the next like a goldfish with too much money and a huge supply of speed.
I went the Unifi route a few years ago and have had zero issues, nor have any of my friends who I have convinced to do it as well. With HomeKit you can have cameras show up on your TV and the api lets you monitor all things related to your network in Grafana.
However, in order to maximize the benefits you need to have ethernet wiring throughout your home because so many of the products are PoE.
Yes, the only reason why I didn't go down that route earlier was wiring - more expensive and kind of a pain in the ass, especially for outdoor cameras.
Obviously I'm not going to throw away all my Nest cameras, but surely enough, I won't be buying new ones once they die.
Unifi is not flawless regards canceling or limiting services either, BUT most of the stuff works even when they are dead because most features work locally.
So be aware, there are dragons. On the other side: works flawless for me for many years now.
I only have Unifi products for networking (UDM and a couple of APs) but love it. Have ran into a couple of small issues but Unifi really gets out of your way when you want to fix something.
Google domains going away is going to be such a pain in the ass for some people.
They say that the "Google domains team" will be assisting people with the transition. What a crock of shit. One time, my google domains account got locked for no reason I'm aware of - tried to find out but could only reach bot support. They kept charging me though, of course - and I couldn't cancel because I was locked out the account. Tried unsuccessfully for a few months to resolve the situation and found it easier to cancel the credit card associated with the bill.
"Google domains team", lol, there is no team. People will be on their own here.
The Picasa photo organizer by Landscape, which Google purchased in 2004 and then killed eight years ago, is still the best photo organizer I have found.
It is fast, light-weight, and intuitive, and totally functional so long as you don't ask it to handle newer image or video formats.
I think in Picasa's case, they learned from that and turned it into Google Photos. I don't think there's any shared code, but at least they learned from it from a product perspective. I would say Google Photos turned out great.
Felt twinges of grief as I recognized some of these. I still miss Reader. But some weren't killed so much as became other products -- Urchin became Google Analytics, Google Mini became CSE (now Programmable Search), Google Refine became Open Refine, etc.
For some of these other ideas, I’m actually surprised Google even launched them. It’s hard to imagine most of these ideas moving the needle for Google at all. This must be the result of 20% time. I’ve heard they no longer have that?
> I don't think I'll be paying for any new Google products any time soon.
Here's a parable: would you buy a product from a YC-funded startup? This whole site is dedicated to the idea of chasing new ideas at great risk, so... yes, right? You'd buy a product from a startup? Needless to say, YC-funded startups fail at a rate rather higher than Google products (and startups in general at a rather higher rate still). Would you come to this site to exclaim how you "don't think you'll be buying any YC-funded products any time soon"?
Why is the purchase calculus different? I'm not asking for the ethical calculus, those arguments go nowhere. I'm just curious why you'd make a practical argument about a purchase decision in one case that you wouldn't in another. Bluntly: I think you're making an emotional argument, not a practical one.
It's not just the products they kill that sucks, it's all the Apps they kill with their "Free" product, only to kill that off when they get bored of it - leaving the entire ecosystem much worse than if it never existed in the first place.
I've slowly been moving more and more stuff off of Google, but the last few things are ones I've had for years. Gmail and Google Fi.
Google would never in its wildest dreams kill Gmail, but sometimes I do worry about Google Fi. I know others have mentioned not having great experiences, but I've used it since shortly after it was announced with practically 0 issues. Luckily I've never actually had to contact support for anything though so that probably contributes (I hear its pretty terrible). I'd hope its something that will last the long haul.
Switching to fastmail was surprisingly easy and having control of my own domain means I'll never lose access to my emails - I might just need to switch providers.
i do agree with some of what you’re saying google is t limited to just discontinuing a product when it wants to kill it. it could easily make a new google mail branded as a a secure one and only existing accounts or business/edu accounts can get through.
i have many of the same concerns about google, and at this point as long as there aren’t interruptions to their biggest contracts in a meaningful way, i would not put it past google to get more closed off.
tbf some of these products are simple features like the youtube stories one, if you made a similar list for a large web company (like Meta), that list might just be as big
I don't understand why anyone trusts anyone. If you build your business on anyone else's back, then you have to be ready for them to disappear at any time.
That being said, if the choice is between building on Google or JonathansAwesomeSoftwareCompany, then I'm picking Google every day of the week. Google may kill the project, but they are infinitely more likely to remain solvent and be able to throw resources at what I care about than Jonathan is.
Not the biggest Google fan, but this page presents only one side of the picture. Google has some solid services that have been going on for a long time.
Additionally, a personal opinion: They are relatively better than Microsoft/Apple/Amazon.
Why is this a surprise any more?
Except Google Cloud and Google Workspace, everything else is a risk. I know many people don't trust Google even for Cloud and Workspace, but I give them a strong benefit of doubt on those two.
I would be shocked if Google killed search in the next 10 years. I guess it could become unrecognizable by being merged with bard, but the product will exist
A market Google never successfully entered, even though they tried, was social media. This site shows the failed attempts, most notably Google+. Perhaps Youtube Shorts will die soon too.
I’m not one to put stock in new Google products, but YouTube Shorts probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon as long as the partner program that launched in January does well for itself.
Go is sufficiently entangled in a lot of modern tech to ensure that someone would take ownership. Possibly even the CNCF, seeing how most projects under their wing are Go-based.
I read “I still miss Google Reader, never forget” at least once a week.
Why hasn’t a replacement popped up? Surely the operating costs are much lower these days and there’s clearly demand. Isn’t it the perfect startup product?
There's a bunch of replacements. I like https://newsblur.com but there are 4-6 large-ish similar sites.
That said, partially what people miss is the relative cultural hegemony of Google Reader. It was RSS front-and-center, prominently featured on websites, supported by the biggest company in tech, with all the users there and able to take advantage of the (sparse) social features.
People also miss the fact that, even if RSS wasn't hugely popular among mainstream users, it was certainly a widely-supported part of the web ecosystem. And it's more satisfying to rage at Google for RSS's relative decline than it is to blame the mainstream consumers who never used it or who moved to modern social media.
Interestingly, my experience is that it's still about as widely-supported as it was back in the Google Reader heyday, probably because the people developing these sites tend to be weirdos like us. It is less visible now, admittedly.
I just wish Feedly would stop forcing their insipid (and broken) "AI" features on me. No, articles about variable sports standings don't involve "leadership changes".
I tried to use some of the Feedly AI and it’s not even available in Pro, just Enterprise levels. It’s becoming annoying enough I’ve started thinking about moving elsewhere. Even though I mostly use Unread to read Feedly feeds on my phone.
This graveyard is such a great list of fads. Reading thru it I remember how hot each on of the services google was mimicking was for a time. Ahh.. google. The world's biggest Also Ran
They started by killing my OnHub, suddenly it wasn't good enough to operate as just another Nest puck. I moved off that. They killed Stadia, OK fair enough. Surprisingly, they killed my Nest Guard system too, now I have to move on to some third party they partnered with. Half of my cameras don't work as expected in the Home app, only the "new" ones do. Then they killed Domains for whatever reason.
I don't think I'll be paying for any new Google products any time soon.
When the cameras and smoke detectors stop working, I'll move on to something else. Unifi perhaps?