Google fucked around too long for me to consider using any of their new services and I’m working on dropping the old. Got bit in the ass with Allo, Hangouts, GPM, Inbox, and latestly Domains, which I thought was safe.
Yeah getting dependent on any Google service is just a waiting game to handle catastrophe. That said I’ve yet to find a single semi-competent calendar widget in Android (month view most importantly) which keeps me. But as the legacy workspaces fiasco showed it’s only a matter of time until I’m forced to take action.
Have you tried Proton’s calender? I’ve relied solely on it since its beta a couple of years ago.
When the workspaces-fiasco occurred I even signed up for Proton, but even as of today their only calendar widget is a glorified to-do-list for the current day. A shame really, I submitted feedback over a year ago for a widget with a monthly overview but alas. I get the feeling they’re very Google-like in that they pump out new features but hardly maintain/develop what’s already released.
I’ve always suspected that the reason Google keeps abandoning products is because they’re actually in it for the data. They’re not out to make a good RSS feed reader or a good music service, they’re interested in how people use feed readers or how people use music. Once they sucked all the data they wanted out of it they trash it.
There’s also data sources which they’ve never abandoned, like watching people’s location (baked into Android and Maps), or email, or photos, or files (Drive), and of course web search. Probably because the nature of this kind of data remains always relevant.
This is all very interesting for chat because they’ve been revisiting this product category so many times, trashing and re-doing chat clients in endless variations, as opposed to sticking to one or two (one for enterprise and one for regular people, for example). Not sure what that says about chat as a data source. Either it’s a particularly challenging category, or it keeps evolving so Google keep discovering new angles that are worth mining.
Google’s inability to stick with something despite its flaws and working on making it better over time, but instead constantly scrapping and renaming services is why I don’t bother investing in any of their experimental projects. Why should anybody waste their time getting used to something if google is just gonna ditch it after a while.
Can’t wait to see Google rename or kill Chat because it’s not gaining traction as expected.
Google Chat is trash. It can’t beat Signal in terms of features and never will because Chat is by Google.
