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Google Now was the better phone assistant, no AI or LLMs needed
(9to5google.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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The era of Google Now and Inbox was a golden era.
Going back to regular Gmail from Inbox was what finally broke my faith in Google and I was a proper fanboy too.
I have a very similar story. I was the most Google centric person I know in 2014 and 2015. I grew disillusioned after they killed Inbox. I realized that tech doesn't always get better with time. Sometimes the money motive leads to tech actively getting worse for users
It's years later and they still haven't incorporated inbox features into Gmail like they said they would and probably never will
There's no money behind it, partially because there's no real competition pushing them to provide a better experience. Plus, anything that saves time with email actually has a perverse financial disincentive. It means less time viewing the Promotions tab in Gmail. Inbox was the last gasp of innovation for its own sake at Google.
Well joke's on them as now I find my email experience so unbearable I barely open it at the cost of missing important stuff :p
I miss those features so much - I was also one who had the Googlillusion shattered by the discontinuation of Inbox.
Me waiting for Inbox features to be incorporated into Gmail:
Not to be dramatic but same. For me it was Now, Inbox, then Play Music; the last being the final straw. The replacements for those services being notably worse showed they don’t give two shits about the end user experience. And don’t get me started on the messaging debacle.
Play Music was brilliant. Now we have that POS named YouTube Music that is impossible to manage your songs, because that turd mixes songs with regular YouTube videos and playlists that have nothing to do with music.
I have Tidal now, way better than anything else. Screw.you, Google.
Play Music pulled me away from my alternative sources of music. I used to keep a gigantic library of acquired music. I'm going back to old means now that YouTube music seems to be going down weird routes and adding functions that absolutely do not benefit me. Samples and comments? No thanks.
Only thing keeping me subscribed is YouTube premium. I watch a lot of YouTube content.
Annoying yes but at least these days there's one check box in the settings that turns off the connection between likes in YouTube and YouTube music.
Yes, since Play Music went down I switched to Spotify. Not really happy either but the best alternative for the moment IMO. Also slowly migrating my email to proton.
Now, Inbox, Reader and Play Music. Not that it was available in my country, but I think Google fibre was around the same time. I guess you could throw Google Chrome pulling internet standards forward rather than regressing them, into that box too.
Google was really on to a run of genuine winners at that point, weren't they? It's kinda a shame to see that all of the replacements really still are several steps behind what we had.
I know now that this trajectory almost seems inevitable for any big tech company now, but imagine where we would be now if Google had kept making genuinely good products and improvements.
Inbox was great, at least for my personal use. I'm not sure how much I would've liked at as a work email client, Gmail would probably have been better, but inbox seemed to 'just work' for my personal email needs. Felt so bad going back to Gmail. And Gmail still sucks just as bad several years later.
Same story here. I'll never understand why they canned Inbox when it was clearly superior to vanilla Gmail.
Having worked in corporate America for some time now, I would guess it was 95% internal politics. Whoever ran the inbox team didn't play the game right.
Was Google Now even usable outside the US? I remember it was pretty useless for my use case scenario back in the days... But I used the dumbed out version on iOS though.
What was the experience with Android phones outside the US?