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> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, r

> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.

nostrademons 8y ago
It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.