Google used to be kinda neat sometimes, especially on Android, nowadays, I don't care anymore
Yesterday I read something super random and that barely matters to anyone, Google is testing a new phone call screen UI, I donāt know why, but it got me thinking about the old times when Google made genuinely cool things for Android, and the internet, or at least thatās how it looked to me at the time.
I remember being obsessed with stuff like Google Now,I did everything in my power to get it running on my Galaxy S3 mini back in the day, because it was really nice to use and it looked so clean, swipe away the stuff I didnāt care about, tailoring the algorithm to my needs, resulting on a pretty alright source of news. Of course RSS aggregators would become my choice over time, but I liked Now just fine. I have to say I was not around when Google Reader was a thing, so I didnāt know what I was missing.
Even when changes were met with criticism by some people, such as with Material Design back in Android Lollipopādonāt you miss those codenames for Android versions???āin the end, Iād say the majority loved those changes and how the OS kept feeling more and more integrated, with a standard design philosophy where all apps look like they are part of the same system, flashing early builds of Lineage OS or Resurrection Remix just to get that on my phone was my jam.
And of course, after every flash, it was unthinkable for me to not get the Google Apps; Gmail was neat, Google Calendar was neat, all of the apps followed Material Design perfectly and my phone just looked awesome and everything was synced together! None of those apps had any bloat, no useless features, they just did what they did and they did it well. Maybe itās just my nostalgia talking, they are still not FOSS and they probably gathered lots of user data to sell to advertisers, but at least they were cool to use for ignorant young me.
Google Lens was incredible, even today, it was also built-in to Google Assistant, easy to access by holding my Home buttonālong live 3-button navigationāand I was using it for a while. Recently however, Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to replace Assistant with Gemini, and decided to replace Google Lensāwith its ability to turn images into text, search for similar images on the fly, and auto-translate text to different languagesāinto AI slop that will just spit out what it thinks is going on on screen, I canāt select text, I canāt do anything with that, itās just a utterly useless description generator! Thankfully, I managed to find a way to get Assistant and Lens back on their settings,āOnly for them to announce today that they are phasing out Assistant completely, ugh.
Itās weird for me to be writing and remembering how Google used to be, when they just keep messing things up so much today. Nowadays, other than Lens and YouTube, I barely use their services. But back then, I was a fan, I wanted them to make cool stuff and keep adding features to things. I didnāt get a chance to use Google Reader, which was apparently replaced with Now, which I liked, and then Discover, which I hated, and I never really got into Google+, their attempt at social media that nobody in my circle got to use but was apparently beloved by many communities of techies and the like that are now on Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Looking back, their fall from grace was probably something to be expected from the start, Iām sure they were criticized, obviously, people were warned to not get into their ecosystem, to not trust it. They are the reason self-hosted emails are barely a thing anymore, theyāre the reason RSS started to lose popularity, they are the reason HTTPS became the standard and locked the web from older devicesāmaybe this one isnāt so bad but alasāthey are the reason SEO and whatever is abused and so much trash is showing up in search results instead of real websites made by real people.
Ok, maybe they arenāt the only reason all of that happened, but surely they share part of the blame?
Despite this, I can probably find old blog posts from people in the 2000s that are like āoh Gmail is cool I donāt have to bother anymore with setting up my electronic mailā and āGoogle is awesome, Google Reader is great!ā and āgo follow me on Google+, itās so cool!ā because people are like that.
Still, now we know, they are evil.
Despite everything, people still go for the shiny new things, just look at X or Y or Z, thereās some people there who think itās the next big thing. In a few years they will look back and write āI miss the old times when X, Y and Z was cool,ā and there will be others who will say āsee? thatās why I never trusted X, Y and Z.ā And so on and so forth.
