Google Play Music is the default, preinstalled music app. It's discontinued and can't even play my local MP3s anymore. YouTube Music is unfortunately worse. Play Music can't be uninstalled.
Google Photos is the default, preinstalled Photo Gallery app. Part of its service is discontinued. It can't be uninstalled.
I bought a Samsung phone a few months ago. It too has a bunch of apps you can't remove. It's still not clear to me why some apps can be disabled and uninstalled but others can just be disabled. But oh yeah, with ADB it seems you can remove some/all of them.
Except with Samsung you don't really know what you're uninstalling because a bunch of apps are weirdly named and not documented at all which leads one down the rabbit hole of inventorying each app and the permissions it has.
Compare apples to apples - Samsung and their Android version are a mess. Most vendors do the same because they can and to differentiate themselves and earn extra money ( like having Facebook crap preinstalled). Android would have never worked if it weren't so open in the first place, and at least the workarounds are well documented and you can usually flash with LineageOS or something; it doesn't help your average Joe, but each manufacturer having their own custom OS with the same crap wouldn't have helped him either.
After unboxing a new device, i usually take a look at what is installed (using pm) and poke around (by reading the app manifest and sending intents to the app).
TBH, so is iOS if you start actually worrying about services running on the device that may not be necessary or helpful, but iOS just doesn't tell a regular user they exist.
1. sudo apt-get-install android-tools-adb
2. Connect phone using usb, choose file transfer
3. In terminal type: adb shell
4. On phone allow dialog that appeared
5. In terminal in adb shell type: pm list package
6. Find which app is it and uninstall it: pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.facebook.services
I don't think they were looking for serious advice on removing the icons, but simply lamenting how absurd it is that multiple of the default apps on a phone released nine months ago are now broken.
I really hate this concept of preinstalling apps on the phone that cannot be uninstalled/disabled. Especially crap apps like Facebook and Instagram. Why o why I cannot remove Facebook or Instagram when I don't even use it anymore.
And this is even worse with brands like Oppo. They have good hardware but so much crap wasting battery and cpu running on by default which cannot be disabled or uninstalled.
I was able to disable/uninstall with adb a lot of it but with every "Security update" it gets right back on the phone and then I have to do it all over again (SOs phone). Also it's getting more and more restrictive and even adb fails on half of these apps like Game center, etc nowadays :/
First, thank you for the tip. I'd tried this a while back and it didn't work; I didn't realize you needed the --user flag! That said, one nitpick:
> any app
I was not able to uninstall the Samsung Pay Framework (com.samsung.android.spayfw) with this method; it hangs forever. Trying to uninstall via the gui tells me that it cannot be uninstalled since it is required by the device administrator. Going to the device administrator screen shows nothing enabled, so I cannot disable whatever is preventing the uninstall.
I don't believe you can uninstall OEM apps from the drive of the phone unless you have root permission.
As another comment mentioned, you can disable them for the single user over adb. On my sony phone you can disable OEM apps the same place you'd normally uninstall them in the GUI.
It took some clicking (tapping?), but I disabled a bunch of cruft 2 years ago when I bought the phone and haven't had any issues.
I recently learned that the uninstall cmd doesn't uninstall the app from the phone but only for the user. This may come handy if you uninstall something by mistake, say, an essential service. Forgot the reinstall cmd but it's easy to find.
I also use Pixel 3a as my main phone, despite having an employer-provided iPhone.
The only killer app that still keeps me on Android is Firefox with uBlock Origin. If Apple allowed functional 3rd party browsers, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
Content blockers for Safari are basically the same, but with the added bonus of stronger fingerprinting protection from Mobile Safari than Firefox due to the hundreds of millions of iOS users.
I also own a Pixel phone. I can confirm that Google Play Music now does nothing but tell you that it's discontinued, cannot be uninstalled, and takes up over 50 MB, which is egregious. However, Google Photos still works as the local photo gallery. I'm not sure why you'd expect to be able to uninstall it.
If it's an "app" I would expect to be able to uninstall it and install my own.
If it's a basic operating system functionality (dealing with files, viewing photos) it's fine if you can't uninstall it, but then it better not come with any kind of separate user agreement, separate updates, changes in functionality, upselling attempts etc.
I checked the Google Photos app and opened my account settings. According to the information in the app, free & unlimited storage of photos in "high" (not original) quality will still be available for me after June 1st 2021. But uploads from other devices will count toward the available space quota.
So Google Photos works as always on the Google Pixel 3a.
This may be a stupid question ("why not eat cake instead") but why not install LineageOS on it?
It's a clean Android and it's utterly well supported on the Pixel line of phones.
Google only supports these phones for a few years. That is useless to me, who intend to use my tools for much longer than that. LineageOS has provided that support with a minimum of fuss.
Pixel 3a is well supported by Lineageos, I recommend installing it, though the Google Pixel cam app is indeed hard coded to only open previews in Google Photos, not any other gallery.
I have a pixel 3 and it's fine. I don't use google apps and it serves me well. There are dozens of replacement services and apps out there and that's a good thing
You can probably get Google Play Music working with local mp3s if you reset to the factory version of the app and disable auto updates(worked on my Pixel 3).
Interesting. Now that you mention this, it makes sense. It worked as an offline MP3 player before if I remember correctly. Quite unfortunate that they decided to remove this functionallity as well with the update.
This is dishonest. When you bought the Pixel 3a it was never advertised to feature unlimited storage so from that angle, nothing changed for you and Photos is still the same product.
Googlers are like toddlers with all the toys in the world: they quickly get bored and move on.
I'm reminded of Paul Graham's essays about this and payments ticks two of the major themes: it's both unsexy and it's a schlep. And that's why Google won't succeed in this space.
Apple uniquely seems to have maintained the ability to tackle these problems. I remember when Apple Pay launched and was derided (here and elsewhere) but every few weeks there'd be another announcement where another group of financial institutions were brought in to the ecosystem. You keep plugging away at that, customers will start using it and after years of schlep you'll have mature payments infrastructure.
Google chat apps were a meme internally even when I was still there (2017). Deprecating Hangouts features, copying Slack, creating new orgs to make the same mistakes all over again (but hey, lots of people got promoted). It was a joke and still is.
And all they had to do was copy iMessage. That's it. Apple had the foresight, market power and wherewithal to push iMessage onto resistant network operators (who were all too happy to continue nickel-and-diming customers with massively profitable SMS charges long after any cost arguments had disappeared).
> Googlers are like toddlers with all the toys in the world: they quickly get bored and move on.
Wrong. Googlers are just like other normal humans and they respond to incentives presented to them. I worked at Google and observed their promo / bonus / compensation practices closely. The safest way to get big bucks was to launch something, invest some metric to measure something and make sure there is a lot of movement on that metric, repeat that N times in your promo packet and get your peers to do the same in their peer reviews, get promoted and immediately jump to the next sexy project.
Maintaining an existing service wasn't considered important early on. Then it started getting lip service. After a few years, it started getting some token awards every quarter or so. Finally, some smart VPs even started promoting 1-2 maintainers just to make a statement and have those counter-examples in their arsenal in case someone brought up the incentives for maintaining existing products. But the vast majority of promotions still went to launches.
My 2c is that something else is contributing to this problem at Google. Search advertising by far dominates revenue so that pretty much everything else is a "rounding error". So projects that aren't part of, or very tightly related to, search advertising are easy to fuck up without really any significant consequences to Google.
I mean, have millions of pissed off users when you're a startup and you're probably toast. Have millions of pissed off users at Google, and as long as they are still using Google search, and viewing webpages where Google ads are displayed, and it probably doesn't matter, at least in the short term.
> So projects that aren't part of, or very tightly related to, search advertising are easy to fuck up without really any significant consequences to Google.
Not only that, but Google monetarily incentivizes frequent product (re)launches - it's the quickest way of getting a promotion and/or more bonuses, but maintaining an old product does nothing for your career or your team (unless you're Search). At some point, I assume the Google brand will lose enough goodwill that someone in leadership will finally address this.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Googler, but information on how Google measures performance and promotes staff is pretty much public information now.
From what I've heard the problem is still the same promo culture.
When people see their peers getting promoted and earning more money by showing "leadership" and "launch"ing some new project vs. optimizing for end user happiness then this will be the outcome.
Changing culture is very hard because all the people who decide on the employees promotion are those who hacked their way up. So it probably will never change
Google takes not invented here to an extreme cross-team level. Their internal promotion/reward structure must be utterly broken that this exact scenario seems to keep playing out time and time again. I'm honestly surprised shareholders haven't started asking questions about the serious mismanagement of capital allocation.
With this approach nothing else will be there besides Adsense. And when Adsense's eventual, but certain death spiral starts, there will be nothing to gently pivot to.
Though it's understandable that shareholders are just looking at the next quarter.
I think that's a bit unfair on Amazon. Amazon has a lot of incentives for teams to maintain existing products and their core infrastructure, and Google just seem to completely lack that.
The new Google Pay won't work with Google Apps for Your Domain / Google Enterprise / Google whatever they are accounts, which I think means my new pixel 4a will lose NFC payment capabilities soon.
I'm devastated.
I've owned virtually every Nexus/Pixel phone, and have been an android user for 10 years. When I purchased my original Motorola Droid (after standing in line outside the Verizon store in 2009) I also decided to pay for gmail via (what was then branded) Google Apps for your Domain, under the assumption that if you're paying for it, you have more control, you can move the email address away from the custom domain, etc.
I've been nothing but happy with it for 10+ years. Sure, every now and then some newly-launched google product wouldn't quite integrate well, but especially over the past 5 years or so it has been "just another google account".
When I try and install the new Google Pay, I receive an "Account not supported: Enterprise accounts are not supported on Google Pay, please sign in with a personal account" message.
I really hope this is fixed soon, or an error, or there will be some alternative. I literally have given google money at every opportunity, but soon they will take away my ability to give _other people_ money with my phone.
Sounds like it’s time for you to exercise the end-game move you smartly prepared for since day 1: move your email to a new service and begin the painful but necessary task of decoupling yourself from Google. Their suite of consumer services is a RNG at this point, not to be relied on.
Unless they're going to reject your credit card for being associated with another account. Which seems entirely possible, though I don't know if they will or not.
You could also get another credit card, but what a hassle.
I've given up on Google. I used to love them as a company but I've just moved on to Apple. I no longer worry about them mining every aspect of my life (phone activity) for profit and storing it off to the web which is forever. I moved my files over to icloud and my email to ProtonMail. Neither of which seem as "slick" but they're fine and more privacy oriented. I've mostly only ever used MS and Open Office so documents weren't an issue. Apple Pay works fine as well. They don't mine your purchases but I'm sure the CC sell it off to 3rd parties so not much I can do about that but switch to cash and that's not going to happen anytime soon. I had been a pixel buyer myself (since the first nexus phone). Google has lost all their luster for me.
The GSuite/Google Workspace UX on my pixel 4a has been awful. It's so painfully obvious that they do not care. Their customer service sucks too, they sold me an expensive screen protector that immediately got scratched to hell, then told me to go fuck myself because it was past the return date (because I preordered...)
Obviously I cancelled Workspaces, but now my Fi account barely works, and I don't have the time/energy to deal with their idea of customer support (a community forum...) to fix it.
Google Pay was a great way to send money to my kid in college. Since we both had debit cards, it was instantaneous and free. It was easy to use from the web interface. Now they're doing away with the web interface. They don't say why, so the reason has to be pretty shady.
There was some bad UI with the web. It would pop up a window to warn you to only send money to people you know, but it was a window you couldn't move to see who you were sending money to, in case you clicked the wrong person!
But that's better than the experience I had with the app when I paid at a McDonald's recently. I was expecting a screen which said something like "You are about to pay $9.72 to McDonald's Corporation. CONTINUE/Cancel.
Instead, when I put my thumb on my phone's fingerprint sensor, here's the feedback I got: (vibrate)
No information on who I was about to pay or how much I was about to pay. And afterward, absolutely no information about who I just paid or how much I paid them.
I went into the payment history screen and they payment wasn't there either, although it showed up about a minute later.
How is that acceptable?
I would NEVER use the app unless I lost my wallet!
Using the Google Pay app at a point of sale was a terrifying experience.
> absolutely no information about who I just paid or how much I paid them.
That's unfortunately how the contactless payments protocol works. Chip cards don't have a display, so user-visible on-device payment confirmation was never a design goal.
There's been some attempts in introducing it (apparently with mixed/bad results, since it's not a thing anymore), but it's ultimately not possible: Since the final payment amount is often not known at the time you tap/dip/swipe your card, what you'd see on your phone would differ from what is ultimately charged.
Arguably, not showing an amount rather than an estimate that will usually be either way over or under the actual amount is better.
> Since the final payment amount is often not known at the time you tap/dip/swipe your card
As a foreigner, I have trouble understanding this.
How can the final amount of a transaction not be known when you are paying it? Is that one of the usual nonsensical shenanigans stores like to play with taxes in the USA?
At least for the EMV standard the card definitely knows the transaction amount; it's one of the core fields of the transaction that's signed by the chip on the card iff it meets the restrictions configured in it.
Of course, the issuing bank may charge some extra fee on top afterwards, but the amount that the chip card sees and signs should be the exact same number that the POS system would print onto a receipt as the transaction amount.
That's exactly how a contactless debit/credit card would work. I'm fairly sure most (if not all) payment terminals would not have the capability to send your device the information. I use it, get a notification from the bank and from Google Pay usually instantaneously.
> But that's better than the experience I had with the app when I paid at a McDonald's recently. I was expecting a screen which said something like "You are about to pay $9.72 to McDonald's Corporation. CONTINUE/Cancel.
That's written on the payment terminal. Google Pay is just a standard NFC payment. You might be prompted if the payment is large depending of the legislation in your country but for small amount, it's fast on purpose.
The terminal is an untrusted device. It would be much more secure if the details could be printed on my device for my confirmation. (It could then sign them to approve the payment.)
Of course this isn't how the payment system was designed as it was designed for cheap, simple cards. The saving grace is that you can perform a chargeback if the transaction is wrong. Not as elegant, but is basically as effective at the end of the day.
Contactless debit cards can be skimmed without being authd too; does that mean we should make the app not bother to get your finger print and just have nfc on all the time?
Obviously not.
They’re different things: approval and notifications seem pretty appropriate for an app.
Hoping one is talking to that terminal and it's not manipulated to show wrong information. (The later is quite unlikely at a larger store as it would lead to too many complaints, but still nothing I can ; even the first one could be noticed by them not receiving money, thus other payment could be noticed and reverted - eventually)
> Now they're doing away with the web interface. They don't say why, so the reason has to be pretty shady.
The article explains why.
> Just like with Google Allo, SMS-based authentication means there's no desktop support at all. The Google Pay website is being stripped of all its useful functionality because a browser does not have a carrier SIM card and therefore can't be authenticated by the SMS-reliant system.
That's not really an explanation, though. The web interface works today and will continue to work through April 3. So, if Google wanted it to continue, it would.
I've since switched to iPhone but on Android I didn't get a confirmation but I always got a pop up notification at the top of the screen saying who I paid and how much within seconds of the buzz. Maybe it's different in Australia?
You are correct about the payment history though, mine was always missing huge chunks (sometimes weeks) of payments for some reason.
Why? I used to review my GP transactions at night (these days I'm using apple pay). All those charges can be reversed if they don't look right. Don't use your debit card for GPay or ApplePay though, those can be much harder to reverse.
> theoretically makes signing up for the service easier in India
Not entirely sure why this story is throwing shade at Google Pay in India, since the service there has been a runaway success. It's a furiously contested space, but GPay came out of nowhere to grab the #1 or #2 spot depending on what metric you use:
But I agree with the article that while going aggressively mobile-first/only makes a lot of sense in India, it's going to be quite different in a mature market like the US and the transition is going to ruffle a lot of feathers. The biggest sticking point is really how dysfunctional US banking is: in India, thanks to UPI you can pay anybody if you know their phone number, but this is not a thing in the US and that's why you can only do P2P transfers to other GPay users.
For what it's worth, though, I've been using GPay (outside the US) for quite a while now and I've never found myself wishing for a desktop client. P2P payments are almost always to people you're already messaging from your phone or physically interacting with.
Person living in India here. GPay gained success by offering scratch cards (giving you money) and cashbacks for making payments through GPay.
From a UX perspective, it has been notoriously slow and is prone to failures. For example, if the transaction could not go through, it remains pending for 3-ish days while Google retries internally. For real-time transactions, like buying groceries from a street vendor, it isn't practical to wait so long to find out - and mostly results in people paying twice for a product.
Aside from marketing gimmicks and usage by vendors, who by the way use a single QR across 5 different UPI vendors, I'm not sure it really is a "runaway success".
Edit:
Another point to note is that GPay (and other vendors like PhonePe) went around sticking their own QR codes on every shop. This meant that if you wanted to pay by UPI at that shop, you had to install GPay.
This prompted NPCI to issue a circular and ensure QR codes were interoperable across UPI apps - but as I've seen, there still remain tons of shops which have only the GPay proprietary QR Code. Ref: https://razorpay.com/blog/npci-circular-on-upi-interoperabil...
Lethargy by vendors to move over to the new QR could also be one of the reasons why these 2 players hold the lions share in the UPI market.
> if the transaction could not go through, it remains pending for 3-ish days while Google retries internally.
To be clear, the transaction isn't retried. The backend keeps trying to fetch the transaction status until it gets a definitive success/failure from the PSP/issuer.
I agree with your comment though; payments is a frustrating UX if the backend isn't nearly 100% reliable.
UPI in particularly has a dozen or so moving parts in the OLTP path each of which are 90-95% available at best.
From the insiders, I know that issuing banks aren't incentivised to invest in their UPI stack to make them highly available or reliable. That's because government has banned interchange fee on UPI transactions and it wants issuers to absorb the cost of maintaining their UPI stack. So the issuers let that tech stack languish doing their absolute minimum to keep it running.
This is a great example of forcing a party to participate in a transaction and at the same time not pay them to maintain the system. It ends up being counterproductive in terms of frustrating UX and more.
Person living in Canada here. I can confirm that Google Pay can take up to 3 days of internal retries here also. I once called and asked about a payment that didn’t go through and if they could just cancel it but apparently after I fixed the issue I was told I just had to wait for the system to retry again on its schedule, not mine. It’s some quirk about Google Pay in that it seems to affect any consumer services whose billing goes through Google Pay. The closest help article I can find on the subject is https://support.google.com/pay/answer/7644013#zippy=%2Csend-... but they really don’t publicize this quirk, that the system retries automatically. It sounds reasonable to do this for a subscription service, say, and when dealing with non-real-time cash transfers between bank accounts, it’s understandable, but paying with a credit card, for example? I expect that to be basically binary for each transaction: it succeeds or it fails. This “pending” with retry just complicated things…
> GPay gained success by offering scratch cards (giving you money) and cashbacks for making payments through GPay.
I remember reading about some anecdote where a network of friends were doing thousands of transactions a day to game the scratch card system. I'm sure they plugged that loophole (if there was ever one) pretty quickly.
They did misuse their place as the company that owns the software platform that runs on 75% of the mobile devices to do this though. When they launched google pay, it was called "tez" (not sure what it means - probably hindi for speed), only to be changed it to google pay so that when people search "pay" for the paytm app that was the market leader in this space, "google pay" comes first. They did have much better UX than paytm and bhim upi (government provided app for UPI interface) apps, but they still had to rely on unethical app renaming to corner the market.
IIRC it was already a hit as Google Tez, probably because it is a much better name. The google pay re-branding was done when it had already proven to be a huge success, probably with a long-term goal of merging it with the international Google Pay.
I don't think it is really throwing shade at Google Play in India (other than that luke-warm line). I think the main argument is that they didn't really adapt the app to the US market. It would have been trivial to be able to look up an account by email OR phone number OR username but they didn't even bother. They also could have transitioned user accounts but didn't care enough.
The article mostly seems to be complaining that good in India != good in US and that Google needs to adapt to the different markets.
> in India, thanks to UPI you can pay anybody if you know their phone number
Not true. You need the UPI ID of the person, which may probably be phone@bank or phone@paymentsbank. If you assume that everyone is using only Google Pay (or Paytm or PhonePe or Amazon Pay or pick another provider), then those providers would know the UPI ID to connect people to for payments. For people who don’t use these payment services but do have a bank account (say, HDFC or SBI or ICICI), there’s no way you could pay them only by knowing their phone numbers without knowing the bank they have the account with and the bank suffix they use for the UPI ID.
In Australia you can do it too using what is called PayID. But it doesn't require any special 3rd party app. Almost every bank's own app or online banking allows you to do it and payment is instant.
Gpay is also extremely easy to set up in India IFF all your government data is in order. Your bank accounts must have your phone number and Adhaar UID linked. This is usually properly setup if you have a good/proactive bank, because they will pester you to link your phone and UID.
With the above in place, it is just a matter of inputting your phone number into gpay, and it will send and receive a flurry of SMSes, figure out all your bank accounts and their details, and add them into the app. Very seamless and kind of scary.
There is no requirement to link Aadhaar with bank accounts or provide it to banks. That coercion was banned by the Supreme Court in its 2018 verdict. UPI is a mobile solution that requires a mobile phone number that’s linked to one’s bank account. It doesn’t need anything else (other than the account holder’s consent for UPI).
This is really sad. I have given up on Google over the last years. Them taking away Inbox hurt most, but I am still most furious for them disabling the link between Photos and Drive (you can no longer easily get your Google Photos to sync to a desktop). What remains? Gmail and a bit of search, where DDG is encroaching.
> What remains? Gmail and a bit of search, where DDG is encroaching.
Global market shares as of Feb. 2021 [1]:
* Google 92%
* Bing 2.69%
* Baidu 1.33%
* DuckDuckGo 0.64%
Alphabet made $182 billion last year, with a profit of $34 billion, making it the fifth most profitable private business in the world [2]. Much of that is off the back of search and AdWords.
Your numbers might be correct, but here is another statistic that os extremely relevant and extremely promising: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Summary: duckduckgo traffic seems to be increasing approximately exponentially for a while and as far as I can see the trend still continues.
This is extremely interesting, here are three thoughts:
- their are already profitable and have been for a long time already. This is probably very good money (operating costs probably scales slower than revenue)
- it means more search data for DuckDuckGo which will allow them to improve their engine
- it improves their position when they deal with partners (like Bing)
Bing is actually much better than DDG (for recent near real time results) and now it's in many cases better than Google (less SEO spam, probably due to its size). It is also more politically neutral than Google in its results - I started out using Bing for anything politics related, but now switched for many technical and financial searches too.
I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see a threat there.
Bing is now starting to be scary good in some regards.
One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network!
Two observations:
- I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.)
- Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)
DDG do far more work then just syndicating Bing. The have their own crawl, combine many sources, and are much stronger at down weighting low vaulue content.
For many they also have an up hill battle against Google as personalising search results to your interests is a double edged sword.
Well Google is only good if you're looking for paid reviews/blog posts and populist articles from very popular media outlets. I should hope people would realise how far their search quality has decreased in the past 2-3 years (for text search)
At this point, Google Maps is the only Google service I use with some frequency. I always use OpenStreetMap first, but if I need satellite imagery or street view, I fall over to Google Maps. All their other services are replaceable (with reasonable replacements), as far as I am aware.
Edit: I suppose YouTube technically counts as a Google service, which I also use with high frequency.
FYI Michael Leggett, design lead for Gmail and Inbox back in the day has released a chrome extension to bring many of inbox's features back. https://simpl.fyi/ - many people also pair it with https://www.inboxymail.com/ to get bundling too, but long term Michael says he's going to add bundles to Simplify.
> (...) The old GP and the new GP were totally different teams, not even operating out of the same country (old GP was based in SF, USA - new was based out of Singapore). Around fall of 2018 the Singapore team was given complete control over all of Payments at Google due to the success of their app in India. The US based team was completely powerless and had to watch heartbroken as it was decided to shut down their product, the one they had been working on for 10ish years, in favor of the new GP. (...)
It's fun to joke about it but it's much sadder hearing a real developer talk about it IRL. Someone whose team worked on the previous Google Pay project for 10yrs(!).
Why doesn't management create more incentives to build products/services that last? Pay a "maintenance bonus" to make in someone's financial interest to maintain and improve existing projects.
Because, as pointed out elsewhere in the discussion, management doesn't care. Ads is so much bigger than everything else - certainly Google Pay - that virtually nothing else even registers on the periphery. Throw in cross-team Not Invented Here syndrome and a desire for promotion and you have the perfect recipe for a regular groundhog day of ephemeral products that arrive in a dazzle and disappear when the wind changes.
I used the old Google Pay for both tap-to-pay and for organizing my various membership cards. Gas, grocery, coupons, things like that. Since sticking various memberships cards in it, some of the old physical cards have been lost and I hope the rest are still in my filing cabinet.
Because with "new" Google Pay, all of those membership cards are gone. They didn't just not migrate the data over; this isn't a feature present in the new one. I don't see any reason to continue using it. Apple Pay is working better for me for tap-to-pay, and I'm instead trying to replicate some of the old membership card organization with Apple Wallet, albeit without much success yet.
(Can't believe we have to use "old"/"new" delimiters here either, while Google gets to pretend it's the same thing.)
Readit News
Google Play Music is the default, preinstalled music app. It's discontinued and can't even play my local MP3s anymore. YouTube Music is unfortunately worse. Play Music can't be uninstalled.
Google Photos is the default, preinstalled Photo Gallery app. Part of its service is discontinued. It can't be uninstalled.
Except with Samsung you don't really know what you're uninstalling because a bunch of apps are weirdly named and not documented at all which leads one down the rabbit hole of inventorying each app and the permissions it has.
Android is a mess.
Compare apples to apples - Samsung and their Android version are a mess. Most vendors do the same because they can and to differentiate themselves and earn extra money ( like having Facebook crap preinstalled). Android would have never worked if it weren't so open in the first place, and at least the workarounds are well documented and you can usually flash with LineageOS or something; it doesn't help your average Joe, but each manufacturer having their own custom OS with the same crap wouldn't have helped him either.
https://fossbytes.com/peel-remote-use-remove-smart-remote/
TBH, so is iOS if you start actually worrying about services running on the device that may not be necessary or helpful, but iOS just doesn't tell a regular user they exist.
The problem GP is pointing at is that uninstalling an unwanted app shouldn't be hard like that.
And this is even worse with brands like Oppo. They have good hardware but so much crap wasting battery and cpu running on by default which cannot be disabled or uninstalled.
I was able to disable/uninstall with adb a lot of it but with every "Security update" it gets right back on the phone and then I have to do it all over again (SOs phone). Also it's getting more and more restrictive and even adb fails on half of these apps like Game center, etc nowadays :/
> any app
I was not able to uninstall the Samsung Pay Framework (com.samsung.android.spayfw) with this method; it hangs forever. Trying to uninstall via the gui tells me that it cannot be uninstalled since it is required by the device administrator. Going to the device administrator screen shows nothing enabled, so I cannot disable whatever is preventing the uninstall.
As another comment mentioned, you can disable them for the single user over adb. On my sony phone you can disable OEM apps the same place you'd normally uninstall them in the GUI.
It took some clicking (tapping?), but I disabled a bunch of cruft 2 years ago when I bought the phone and haven't had any issues.
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The only killer app that still keeps me on Android is Firefox with uBlock Origin. If Apple allowed functional 3rd party browsers, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
Android allows app to read gps status, do background stuff that is impossible on iPhone:
- you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background
- there are no custom apps that could do phone tracking (it is available to find my device) e.g. like GPSLogger on Android
Can you integrate a ~smart/dumb watch to do action that you want? (e.g. send a http request, make a call)?
Basically iPhone doesn't have Tasker like functionality and for me that is a no go.
Also is there a way to search for an app that is installed or should I still browse a long list and play "finding nemo"?
Also, the qualitative experience, subjective as it is, is so much higher for me, having owned both Android and Apple.
That said I wish open source phones with Linux were a thing (not just Purism, but popular in general)
If it's a basic operating system functionality (dealing with files, viewing photos) it's fine if you can't uninstall it, but then it better not come with any kind of separate user agreement, separate updates, changes in functionality, upselling attempts etc.
I checked the Google Photos app and opened my account settings. According to the information in the app, free & unlimited storage of photos in "high" (not original) quality will still be available for me after June 1st 2021. But uploads from other devices will count toward the available space quota.
So Google Photos works as always on the Google Pixel 3a.
It's a clean Android and it's utterly well supported on the Pixel line of phones.
Google only supports these phones for a few years. That is useless to me, who intend to use my tools for much longer than that. LineageOS has provided that support with a minimum of fuss.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20210104200400/https://store.goo...
I'm reminded of Paul Graham's essays about this and payments ticks two of the major themes: it's both unsexy and it's a schlep. And that's why Google won't succeed in this space.
Apple uniquely seems to have maintained the ability to tackle these problems. I remember when Apple Pay launched and was derided (here and elsewhere) but every few weeks there'd be another announcement where another group of financial institutions were brought in to the ecosystem. You keep plugging away at that, customers will start using it and after years of schlep you'll have mature payments infrastructure.
Google chat apps were a meme internally even when I was still there (2017). Deprecating Hangouts features, copying Slack, creating new orgs to make the same mistakes all over again (but hey, lots of people got promoted). It was a joke and still is.
And all they had to do was copy iMessage. That's it. Apple had the foresight, market power and wherewithal to push iMessage onto resistant network operators (who were all too happy to continue nickel-and-diming customers with massively profitable SMS charges long after any cost arguments had disappeared).
Wrong. Googlers are just like other normal humans and they respond to incentives presented to them. I worked at Google and observed their promo / bonus / compensation practices closely. The safest way to get big bucks was to launch something, invest some metric to measure something and make sure there is a lot of movement on that metric, repeat that N times in your promo packet and get your peers to do the same in their peer reviews, get promoted and immediately jump to the next sexy project.
Maintaining an existing service wasn't considered important early on. Then it started getting lip service. After a few years, it started getting some token awards every quarter or so. Finally, some smart VPs even started promoting 1-2 maintainers just to make a statement and have those counter-examples in their arsenal in case someone brought up the incentives for maintaining existing products. But the vast majority of promotions still went to launches.
I mean, have millions of pissed off users when you're a startup and you're probably toast. Have millions of pissed off users at Google, and as long as they are still using Google search, and viewing webpages where Google ads are displayed, and it probably doesn't matter, at least in the short term.
Not only that, but Google monetarily incentivizes frequent product (re)launches - it's the quickest way of getting a promotion and/or more bonuses, but maintaining an old product does nothing for your career or your team (unless you're Search). At some point, I assume the Google brand will lose enough goodwill that someone in leadership will finally address this.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Googler, but information on how Google measures performance and promotes staff is pretty much public information now.
When people see their peers getting promoted and earning more money by showing "leadership" and "launch"ing some new project vs. optimizing for end user happiness then this will be the outcome.
Changing culture is very hard because all the people who decide on the employees promotion are those who hacked their way up. So it probably will never change
Probably now part of the institutional culture and impossible to eliminate.
I'm sorry I can't hear you over all this money roaring past my ears! Beside Adsense the rest is just a hobby/status game for employees - and it shows.
Though it's understandable that shareholders are just looking at the next quarter.
The reward structure for quite a few of these (FAANG) companies is geared towards launching new features and/or products.
There is little incentive to improve existing software (as an IC). Which is why, for example, every "feature" at Amazon has a press release.
Behind every press release is a promotion for someone.
Is it that new products/features == growth in share value for shareholders?
I'm devastated.
I've owned virtually every Nexus/Pixel phone, and have been an android user for 10 years. When I purchased my original Motorola Droid (after standing in line outside the Verizon store in 2009) I also decided to pay for gmail via (what was then branded) Google Apps for your Domain, under the assumption that if you're paying for it, you have more control, you can move the email address away from the custom domain, etc.
I've been nothing but happy with it for 10+ years. Sure, every now and then some newly-launched google product wouldn't quite integrate well, but especially over the past 5 years or so it has been "just another google account".
When I try and install the new Google Pay, I receive an "Account not supported: Enterprise accounts are not supported on Google Pay, please sign in with a personal account" message.
I really hope this is fixed soon, or an error, or there will be some alternative. I literally have given google money at every opportunity, but soon they will take away my ability to give _other people_ money with my phone.
You could also get another credit card, but what a hassle.
Obviously I cancelled Workspaces, but now my Fi account barely works, and I don't have the time/energy to deal with their idea of customer support (a community forum...) to fix it.
There was some bad UI with the web. It would pop up a window to warn you to only send money to people you know, but it was a window you couldn't move to see who you were sending money to, in case you clicked the wrong person!
But that's better than the experience I had with the app when I paid at a McDonald's recently. I was expecting a screen which said something like "You are about to pay $9.72 to McDonald's Corporation. CONTINUE/Cancel.
Instead, when I put my thumb on my phone's fingerprint sensor, here's the feedback I got: (vibrate)
No information on who I was about to pay or how much I was about to pay. And afterward, absolutely no information about who I just paid or how much I paid them.
I went into the payment history screen and they payment wasn't there either, although it showed up about a minute later.
How is that acceptable?
I would NEVER use the app unless I lost my wallet!
Using the Google Pay app at a point of sale was a terrifying experience.
That's unfortunately how the contactless payments protocol works. Chip cards don't have a display, so user-visible on-device payment confirmation was never a design goal.
There's been some attempts in introducing it (apparently with mixed/bad results, since it's not a thing anymore), but it's ultimately not possible: Since the final payment amount is often not known at the time you tap/dip/swipe your card, what you'd see on your phone would differ from what is ultimately charged.
Arguably, not showing an amount rather than an estimate that will usually be either way over or under the actual amount is better.
As a foreigner, I have trouble understanding this.
How can the final amount of a transaction not be known when you are paying it? Is that one of the usual nonsensical shenanigans stores like to play with taxes in the USA?
Of course, the issuing bank may charge some extra fee on top afterwards, but the amount that the chip card sees and signs should be the exact same number that the POS system would print onto a receipt as the transaction amount.
That's written on the payment terminal. Google Pay is just a standard NFC payment. You might be prompted if the payment is large depending of the legislation in your country but for small amount, it's fast on purpose.
Of course this isn't how the payment system was designed as it was designed for cheap, simple cards. The saving grace is that you can perform a chargeback if the transaction is wrong. Not as elegant, but is basically as effective at the end of the day.
Obviously not.
They’re different things: approval and notifications seem pretty appropriate for an app.
The article explains why.
> Just like with Google Allo, SMS-based authentication means there's no desktop support at all. The Google Pay website is being stripped of all its useful functionality because a browser does not have a carrier SIM card and therefore can't be authenticated by the SMS-reliant system.
You are correct about the payment history though, mine was always missing huge chunks (sometimes weeks) of payments for some reason.
Not entirely sure why this story is throwing shade at Google Pay in India, since the service there has been a runaway success. It's a furiously contested space, but GPay came out of nowhere to grab the #1 or #2 spot depending on what metric you use:
https://yourstory.com/2020/12/google-pay-phonepe-upi-market-...
But I agree with the article that while going aggressively mobile-first/only makes a lot of sense in India, it's going to be quite different in a mature market like the US and the transition is going to ruffle a lot of feathers. The biggest sticking point is really how dysfunctional US banking is: in India, thanks to UPI you can pay anybody if you know their phone number, but this is not a thing in the US and that's why you can only do P2P transfers to other GPay users.
For what it's worth, though, I've been using GPay (outside the US) for quite a while now and I've never found myself wishing for a desktop client. P2P payments are almost always to people you're already messaging from your phone or physically interacting with.
From a UX perspective, it has been notoriously slow and is prone to failures. For example, if the transaction could not go through, it remains pending for 3-ish days while Google retries internally. For real-time transactions, like buying groceries from a street vendor, it isn't practical to wait so long to find out - and mostly results in people paying twice for a product.
Aside from marketing gimmicks and usage by vendors, who by the way use a single QR across 5 different UPI vendors, I'm not sure it really is a "runaway success".
Edit:
Another point to note is that GPay (and other vendors like PhonePe) went around sticking their own QR codes on every shop. This meant that if you wanted to pay by UPI at that shop, you had to install GPay.
This prompted NPCI to issue a circular and ensure QR codes were interoperable across UPI apps - but as I've seen, there still remain tons of shops which have only the GPay proprietary QR Code. Ref: https://razorpay.com/blog/npci-circular-on-upi-interoperabil...
Lethargy by vendors to move over to the new QR could also be one of the reasons why these 2 players hold the lions share in the UPI market.
To be clear, the transaction isn't retried. The backend keeps trying to fetch the transaction status until it gets a definitive success/failure from the PSP/issuer.
I agree with your comment though; payments is a frustrating UX if the backend isn't nearly 100% reliable.
UPI in particularly has a dozen or so moving parts in the OLTP path each of which are 90-95% available at best.
From the insiders, I know that issuing banks aren't incentivised to invest in their UPI stack to make them highly available or reliable. That's because government has banned interchange fee on UPI transactions and it wants issuers to absorb the cost of maintaining their UPI stack. So the issuers let that tech stack languish doing their absolute minimum to keep it running.
This is a great example of forcing a party to participate in a transaction and at the same time not pay them to maintain the system. It ends up being counterproductive in terms of frustrating UX and more.
I remember reading about some anecdote where a network of friends were doing thousands of transactions a day to game the scratch card system. I'm sure they plugged that loophole (if there was ever one) pretty quickly.
The article mostly seems to be complaining that good in India != good in US and that Google needs to adapt to the different markets.
Or their UPI ID. it looks something like "myname@bankname"
Not true. You need the UPI ID of the person, which may probably be phone@bank or phone@paymentsbank. If you assume that everyone is using only Google Pay (or Paytm or PhonePe or Amazon Pay or pick another provider), then those providers would know the UPI ID to connect people to for payments. For people who don’t use these payment services but do have a bank account (say, HDFC or SBI or ICICI), there’s no way you could pay them only by knowing their phone numbers without knowing the bank they have the account with and the bank suffix they use for the UPI ID.
With the above in place, it is just a matter of inputting your phone number into gpay, and it will send and receive a flurry of SMSes, figure out all your bank accounts and their details, and add them into the app. Very seamless and kind of scary.
Global market shares as of Feb. 2021 [1]:
* Google 92%
* Bing 2.69%
* Baidu 1.33%
* DuckDuckGo 0.64%
Alphabet made $182 billion last year, with a profit of $34 billion, making it the fifth most profitable private business in the world [2]. Much of that is off the back of search and AdWords.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.
Summary: duckduckgo traffic seems to be increasing approximately exponentially for a while and as far as I can see the trend still continues.
This is extremely interesting, here are three thoughts:
- their are already profitable and have been for a long time already. This is probably very good money (operating costs probably scales slower than revenue)
- it means more search data for DuckDuckGo which will allow them to improve their engine
- it improves their position when they deal with partners (like Bing)
One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network!
Two observations:
- I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.)
- Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)
Edit: I suppose YouTube technically counts as a Google service, which I also use with high frequency.
FWIW - I wrote this plugin[1] to recreate my workflow[2].
[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/tree/master/elodie/plugins...
[2] https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
> (...) The old GP and the new GP were totally different teams, not even operating out of the same country (old GP was based in SF, USA - new was based out of Singapore). Around fall of 2018 the Singapore team was given complete control over all of Payments at Google due to the success of their app in India. The US based team was completely powerless and had to watch heartbroken as it was decided to shut down their product, the one they had been working on for 10ish years, in favor of the new GP. (...)
Thanks for the link.
Because with "new" Google Pay, all of those membership cards are gone. They didn't just not migrate the data over; this isn't a feature present in the new one. I don't see any reason to continue using it. Apple Pay is working better for me for tap-to-pay, and I'm instead trying to replicate some of the old membership card organization with Apple Wallet, albeit without much success yet.
(Can't believe we have to use "old"/"new" delimiters here either, while Google gets to pretend it's the same thing.)