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I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seri

• ebbv 11y ago
  Yep. For me Google+ was the turning point. It started before that, but if you drew a line graph of Quality of Products for Google I think you'd see the Google+ rollout event on that line without it being pointed out. I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.
  • edem 11y ago
    Google products used to be simple and usable. Now they are all fucked up. Seems like that their QA department went on a permanent vacation. I have actually written to them about my issues and I'm waiting for a response ever since.
    • gchokov 11y ago
      Good luck with the waiting. Notoriously bad at customer support as well.
      • wyattshacker 11y ago
        Interestingly, as the breadth and complexity of Google product grows, the need for true customer service grows, disproportionately. Very few of us needed "customer support" for Google Search, but for many of their newer, more complex products, it's a must. Google either missed this need altogether, or they decided that even with crappy/no CS, they could still make a killing with half-assed products/support. Thoughts?
        • gchokov 11y ago
          I think you are right - and for me having bad customer support is a miss. If the customer support "costs" why don't include that cost in the products price? Bad customer support @ Google has turned me away from their Google Docs. Customer support is also needed when the UI is not self-explanatory like Google's very often. They have Google Apps for the Enterprise, but very often you can't reach the Enterprise without the proper support, product documentation and service. From the other hand, I got very positive experience with Microsoft support which proves that "Customer support at scale" is possible. Thank you for the comment!
  • dman 11y ago
    The place which is hilariously broken is that on the Google play store, I cant give star ratings to movies / music that I like to get a more customized experience because doing so requires you to publicly disclose on Google+ that you liked / disliked that movie/song.
    • obsurveyor 11y ago
      You can make your Likes private on Google Plus.
• bontoJR 11y ago
  > I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. It seems a common feeling that is spreading during the last year... Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074704
  • edem 11y ago
    What I _can't_ understand is why does Google rave all day about "material design" and such when they have dog crap all over their own doorstep?
    • _lce0 11y ago
      Can't understand why everything in lollipop is so white and bright, complely degraded the UX. Android was dark-ish from the start.. now all apps are following the same trend, which will only worsen the situation If I could, I would downgrade to 4.x ..
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's funny how this turn to all-white came along just as screens that use less power the more black colour is displayed became popular...
    • slowmotiony 11y ago
      They could never get design right. First it was complete shit because they didn't care, then they copied Microsoft's metro and called it Holo, then they came up with Cards UI and now they have Material. Not one of these was properly implemented in their own apps, which should tell you a lot about their inner workings.
      • collyw 11y ago
        You obviously don't remember when search engines had a thousand options and buttons and links everywhere.
• blfr 11y ago
  Google Photos is a very recent addition to Google Drive[1]. I'm not sure the change even rolled out to everyone yet and still not all my photos have been migrated. They used to be only availble through the bizarre web interface within Google+ that OP described. Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile. [1] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html
  • greghendershott 11y ago
    I agree the not-yet-abandoned Google apps can be quite superb. Provided you run them using the proprietary {AOL,Prodigy,CompuServe,MSN} client app. a.k.a. Chrome.
• 300bps 11y ago
  I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services. I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.
  • rootuser 11y ago
    Every word in his rant is gold.
  • fullwedgewhale 11y ago
    Google puts out free or cheap services and devices because they're trying to draw users to their platform, which gathers metrics about usage. These feed into the services, but they also feed in to Google's need to be a better advertising platform. Although we think of Google as the company behind the eponymous search engine and Android phone, it's actually an advertiser. I'm not sure if it's still in the 95% range, but it's still high. I have a 7" Nexus tablet which (for the time) was a great tablet at an insanely good price. But I knew I was essentially giving up information about what I read, what I listen to, and what apps I used in exchange for the free services and discounted device. In contrast my Apple devices aren't cheap, and there is less collection of data with the intent of selling my attention to third party advertising clients, but they are more expensive and I pay an iCloud subscription fee. For the most part the Mac software doesn't suck and works reasonably well. I don't love everything about it but it's more appealing than Picasa for photos. I do pay for extra storage on Google to back up my pictures (over 100 gigs of family photos). But I am definitely paying more Apple in a direct sense (buying computers and phones + iCloud) than to Google (Google Play and 1 device). Apple's margin on hardware is high, but they make a quality product (for the most part). What I give Google is information about myself, my work, my family, the music I listen to, the books I read, and anything and everything I ever searched for. They're pretty open and transparent about this, and I pretty much understand what I'm turning over in exchange for their free stuff. See the Google dashboard on you. If there's an application or service hosted by Google, I pretty much understand their intent is to extract data from that service or application. That works for most people, even though they really don't understand this exchange or think about it. Free is a powerful lure and most consumers have come to expect not to pay anything at all for software and services. That's why they download a free game and keep playing it even when they find out it sends the contents of their address book off to some weird holding company. It's also why they get suckered into free games (because 4.99 is just too expensive on an App store) and then spend multiples of that amount in in-game purchases. It's why they're willing to turn over even extremely intimate details of their life for free e-mail or messaging services. But the incentive for Google is not to make great software or hardware because that's how they make their money. Their incentive is to roll out services which help them collect information to feed their need for information about your tastes and behaviors. If that photo app you're using doesn't really give them more information, there's no incentive to make it better. Apple has an incentive to make software good enough to support their device/computer sales. Microsoft (arguably) has an incentive to make software good enough for manufacturers to license it. Apple and Microsoft, no matter how much people love to shit on them, actually have more straight forward, simple motives. They have an actual financial incentive to care about the quality of the product they deliver because you are paying them (directly or indirectly). tl;dr Google only makes software good enough to draw you in to collect data. Other vendors are selling yous something and therefore have an interest in making that thing better.
• jknightco 11y ago
  Its been a few months since I used the Android calendar app, but I'm pretty sure if you turn the device into Landscape it'll change to month view.
  • edem 11y ago
    I always never use landscape because it is not handy enough for me (I use a smartphone not a tablet). I actually turned the reorientation accessibility feature off.
    • jknightco 11y ago
      Yeah, its definitely an anti-feature, but at least there's the option!
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I just went and checked. Surprisingly, they added the month view to portrait and brought back the week view (who had the idea that "week" has 5 days is beyond me). If you turn your device to landscape position however, you get only the week view, with no ability to change it.
• cliveowen 11y ago
  Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November. Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway... There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.
  • cillian64 11y ago
    I can't replicate your "Android UI failed" problem on a Nexus 5 running Android 5.1
    • eanplatter 11y ago
      me neither, but a bug I've only seen on my Nexus 5 is that my timestamps on recent hangouts messages say "now" for hours. This is a problem if I mix hangouts and SMS because SMS runs on a normal timestamp, so essentially all of my texts appear above my hangouts. For a while it just seemed like my texts weren't actually coming in at all.
      • genericone 11y ago
        Is your timezone or date-time set differently than your current location?
      • 11y ago
• def_illiterate 11y ago
  I think the last UI decision google got right was the search box on the main page.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Nah, GMail was good. It still is, to be honest, compared to free webmail alternatives, but it keeps downgrading itself.
• wordbank 11y ago
  Gmail became so painful about two years ago. So I moved to Fastmail (wow, web UI can be THAT fast!). New Google Maps were broken for a couple of months. Google's own developer plugins like Game Services and AdMob are buggy and unintuitive. Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.
  • breakingcups 11y ago
    Check out Office Online. Dropbox has integration with it now I believe. https://office.live.com/ https://office.live.com/
• userbinator 11y ago
  As with most software/hardware, the alternative is to not "upgrade" and put up with the negative comments you'll get (both from other people and websites) but if it's such a regression in functionality, should we really continue calling them "upgrades"? I feel like we've reached somewhat of a saturation point in the past few years. Meanwhile, with systems becoming more locked-down and proprietary, every new revision feels like it's incrementally taking control away from the user and replacing it with superficial beauty. I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.
• eonw 11y ago
  i dont have kitkat yet, but are you serious? what good is a calendar without a month view?
  • soylentcola 11y ago
    The original "new" calendar only had month view in landscape but the current one has full month view in portrait as well. Basically with the original design I assume they figured it would be too info-dense and hard to read. People complained (understandably) so they added it in an update.