While there are likely many decisions made by the internet behemoth that makes you ask "why?" here are ten that make us wonder, "What were they thinking?"
10. Google Glass
The first item on our list is Google Glass, a pair of futuristic smart glasses that captivated the whole news cycle when it was first revealed. Google Glass, a futuristic innovation right out of science fiction, was a pair of intelligent spectacles released in 2013. They came in at a hefty $1500 price tag and never achieved the commercial success that the corporation had hoped for. It never indeed took off due to privacy issues and its restricted use cases. Last year, the MyGlass app for pairing and configuring Google Glass was removed from the Google Play Store.
9. Google Stadia
Google Stadia is more of a question mark on Google’s release timeframe than a mistake. Gaming has never appeared to be Google’s thing, and while the service is valuable, it has several flaws that it can’t necessarily fix on its own.
To summarise its issues, you must meet three requirements to play Stadia. Even if you have a reliable low-latency connection, it may not be fast enough to use game streaming services. Perhaps it's fast enough, but you're too far from the nearest data center. Furthermore, if you're primarily utilizing Stadia to avoid having to download games because it takes too long, your connection probably can't handle Stadia in the first place.
8: Google Allo and the Google Messaging App Cemetery
The mix of Google and messaging services always produces intriguing results. Over the years, we've seen Google Talk, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, and a slew of other messaging services from the firm come and go. There's also the company's penchant for including messaging functions in apps and services that don't require them. While a messaging service makes sense (clearly), it appears that Google kills off any launches.
7: Navigating Pills
With Android Pie, Google introduced pill navigation. It was killed off with Android 10 on the Google Pixel 4 in favor of full-screen gestures, and it vanished as fast as it appeared. The Android Developers blog then published a piece detailing why Google chose gesture navigation over pill navigation. Most Android users prefer the current approach to the two-button pill navigation. To begin with, the two-button pill wasn't even symmetrical or centered.
6: Farewell, Google Play Music, and welcome, YouTube Music
The decision to discontinue Google Play Music was odd, especially given the lack of a clear successor. It was the only pre-packaged “out-of-the-box” means to play local music files on your phone's storage on many devices because it was set as the default music player on Android. While YouTube Music is an excellent service, Google Play Music was also because it allowed you to upload 50,000 MP3 songs for free and stream them to any of your devices. You could migrate everything to YouTube Music if you wanted to, but there is still no local music player option for Android. Not to mention that YouTube Music has a few flaws of its own, such as the fact that free users do not have access to screen-off playback. If you want to listen to music (rather than watching every second of the audio playback on your phone), you'll have to hope that your device's manufacturer has created its music player. To be fair, it's likely that you have at this time.
5. Google's major rebranding
Many individuals were perplexed by Google's colossal makeover and wondered what the point of it all was. Google-ified colors and designs were used to replace services with their distinct brand identification and personality, resulting in a uniform appearance. Understandably, the company wants to establish a unified brand identity... but it's difficult to tell the difference between them at a glance. It stripped each service of its identity, making it more difficult for anyone deep within the Google ecosystem to identify them apart. It isn't an "error" in the traditional sense, but it is a puzzle as to why the corporation decided this move was required.
4: Extinction of the Nexus line
The Nexus line of smartphones was one of the most popular among enthusiasts. My exposure to ROMs and modding was the Google Nexus 5, which I followed up with purchasing the OnePlus 3. The Nexus line of smartphones was the most "Google" Android you could buy, intended exclusively for developers. Even yet, ordinary customers bought one anyway to have the most authentic Android experience. When the Nexus brand was phased out in favor of the Pixel line, it signaled a shift in Google's strategy, as its smartphones were no longer geared solely at developers.
3: Google Play Edition & Android One
Did you know that the Android One initiative is still going strong? Given that Google doesn’t seem to update the Android One page anymore, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s dead. Though we haven’t heard much about the Android One program in recent years, the recently introduced rugged Nokia XR20 is an Android One device. The Mi A series from Xiaomi was primarily recognized as the forerunner of the Android One experience. However, HMD Global has also been a long-time backer of the initiative. The Android One program has a strange resemblance to the Nexus series, with close-to-stock Android and frequent updates.
On the other hand, Google Play Edition was a fantastic scheme for buying devices that had official Google support. The HTC One M8 is the most prominent example; you can buy one via HTC with HTC’s SenseUI or Google Play with a more “stock” Android experience. They had unlocked bootloaders, and the Samsung Galaxy S4 was also accessible at the time under similar circumstances. Even press renders of a Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S5 leaked at the time, but the device never arrived, and the program was terminated soon after.
2: Google Photos storage will no longer be accessible on future Pixels.
Why won't future Google Pixel devices have, at the very least, free compressed Google Photos storage? This is one I'm still trying to figure out. The original Pixels benefited from allowing you to store all of your images in their original quality for free, albeit this was later reduced. Google has verified that previous Pixels can still keep images for "life" in a compressed format for free on Google Photos, but that this feature will not be available on future devices.
Given how much Google promotes the Pixel's image capabilities, you'd think they'd toss in as much as possible to make them more desirable and offer people another reason to buy one. Many people use Google Photos, and a lifetime of free compressed uploads combined with the purchase of a Google Pixel would be a terrific deal. But, regrettably, it will no longer be the case.
1. Google+
The Google+ tale is amusing, and it’s one of the few instances Google has shown that it’s possible to be entirely out of its depth. After years of difficulty and a catastrophic data leak, the corporation decided it wasn’t worth continuing.
In case you missed it, there was a flaw in the Google+ People APIs in March 2018 that may have exposed the data of over 500,000 users. This, combined with Google+'s relatively small user base (90 percent of Google+ sessions last less than 5 seconds), was enough for the company to call it quits. While Google previously stated that the closure would take ten months, it opted to speed up the process after another data breach impacted 52.5 million users, exposing personal profile information to developers.
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