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all_blue_chucks | 5 years ago

That's an impressively long list but some of those entries are a bit of a stretch. Google Nexus, for example, was rebranded as Google Pixel. Most people wouldn't describe rebranding as "killing" a product.

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judge2020|5 years ago

A quick list:

Angular: v1 is "dead", but is still receiving major version updates https://angular.io/guide/updating-to-version-10

Hangouts: meet.google.com

Password Checkup: integrated into Chrome, Firefox has its own thing as well.

Google Photos Print: it's just no longer a subscription service that automatically selects photos (who would want something to pick a photo book's photos for you??). https://www.google.com/photos/printing/

Shoelace: Kind of disingenuous to include Area 120 projects, which are experiments by design.

Google Chrome Apps: Sunset in favor of PWAs which don't rely on Chrome Web Store? sign me up!

Dragonfly: Was never public so I don't see this as 'killed'.

I think these different announcement types should be noted or properly filtered, maybe by noting the app that replaces the app, eg "alternative: google meet".

blaisio|5 years ago

The point is they create a huge amount of hassle for users by constantly killing/replacing/renaming products, and it also shows that they aren't doing any effective long-term planning. That's what makes people mad.

Angular: I agree that angular is not dead, people can still use v1 if they want to. This does not count.

Hangouts: the new version has different pricing, different features, different name, different URL, different apps... this absolutely counts (and is one of the most egregious examples)

Password checkup: the extension worked fine, but they intentionally disabled it. Any references to it on the web now have to be updated to refer to password checkup in the browser. Anyone who knows how to use the extension has to relearn how to use it in the browser. This counts.

Google Photos Print: yes the original was stupid, but it was still a product and is now gone. This counts.

Shoelace: yeah this never really launched in the first place. This doesn't count.

Google Chrome Apps: I mean really? Anything that requires rewriting parts of an app to make it work counts!

Dragonfly: this was never released, it doesn't count. But it is important that people know about this, it is an example of Google quite blatantly being evil.

d_rc|5 years ago

Angular being the latest addition there.. I agree, I wouldn't really say that 1.7 development being discontinued is a "death" of Angular. Really not.

arthtyagi|5 years ago

I agree with some of what you're saying but Hangouts didn't JUST get rebranded. Meet was introduced while Hangouts was still alive.

dafoex|5 years ago

The only real issue I have with ditching chrome apps in favour of PWAs it all the lost work in making web apps look and feel native. Now we have to live with a half-browser wrapper that may or may not have the forward and back buttons as fallback in order to use PWAs that the developer never expected to be "installed" to a computer.

Rebelgecko|5 years ago

Are PWAs comparable with Chrome apps? IIRC games like Bastion were able to use native code (maybe WASM fills the gap?)

dafoex|5 years ago

Same with Google Goggles, which was replaced by Google Lens. It wasn't just a simple rebranding as the two existed at the same time momentarily, but no functionality was really lost.

andoriyu|5 years ago

nah, Nexus was partner phones. Pixel is actually made and designed by google.