There's a website called killedbygoogle.com that highlights products, services, etc., that Google has killed, stopped supporting, or ended. While it’s absolutely true that Google has killed a lot of products, the vast majority of these things were either replaced with something better, had their functionality absorbed into another app or were just not being used. Failed experiments. I think that this whole idea of Google's graveyard gets blown out of proportion.

For example, Google killed Chromecast, but they've moved on to a new product. They've got new Google TV stuff, so Chromecast is dead, but the new Google TV things have Chromecast built in. They've moved on. That product doesn't really make sense in 2024, so yeah, it's dead, but it was replaced with something that encapsulates what it was going to be doing.

Sometimes They Tinker Too Much..

That being said, there are times where Google tinkers with things for seemingly for no reason and you just are left scratching your head thinking, "Why have you done this?"

1. Google Photos

The first place we are looking is in Google Photos. They just will not stop moving things around and it is driving me absolutely insane. Let's say I want to get to my albums where I have organized some of my photos. In the past, I would simply click on library and I can see the photos that are on my device and then boom, right there are my albums. It was super easy to get to them.

If I want to get to my albums now, I have to go into collections and then you're looking for albums there. There's an additional step and I don't know why we needed that. I understand this whole collections thing, kind of organizing things, people and pets, on this device, documents, places, that makes sense to me. But albums are like their own version of collections. So now they're nested one layer deep inside another collection. It's like albums inside albums. It doesn't make sense to me. They should be quicker, easier to access like they used to be.

And there's more than just this. I do a lot of photo and video sharing through Google Photos as well. We have some automatically sharing albums. In the past, you can see sharing is right down there at the bottom. It's front and center. If you click on it, everything will start to populate. There's all of your little shared albums, so forth and so on.

In the new Google Photos, it’s bizarrely complicated to do this. You can click the notification bell in the top right and you’ll see changes to these shared albums, but where are the actual shared albums? Collections, of course! Right there in your albums folder which is full of album folders. They’re just all mixed together now.

Want to know where your conversations are now? I’m sure you would. Click that bell, click the three dots in the top left and that’s where they have hid them now. And now today I see news that they’re removing the Memories button at the bottom. Guess where it’s going? It’s being renamed Moments (confusing no one, I’m sure) and then being shoved into that increasingly bloated catch-all Collections section.

Why? Why do this? Why make this more complicated? Just leave it alone.

2. YouTube Music

Here is another app that they just won't stop moving things on. It's YouTube Music. I think part of this is intentional because they want to kind of keep things churning so that you'll be looking at different things, listening to different music. But every time I open this app, things are moved around. For like a week and a half my list Mixed For You section was just gone. I had no way to access it. It was nowhere to be found and it just popped back up. It's constantly shifting around and changing shape.

Another thing that kind of bugs me and bums me out is that they have shoved podcasts into YouTube Music. And I know that for some people this makes sense, right? They're both audio formats. But I don't think of podcasts and music as being the same thing at all. I don't want podcasts in my music application. Now, I will say that they do a pretty good job of not shoving podcasts into my face, but you can't use Google Podcasts anymore. That app is dead now. So if I do want to listen to podcasts through a Google application, I have to use YouTube Music and I’d rather not. That's just me. I just don't like that. I just feel like they should be their own separate thing and that's something that I wish they hadn't have tinkered with. They could have just left Google Podcasts alone and that would have been totally fine.

3. Pixel Fold

Here's one that's probably near and dear to quite a few people watching this channel. They released the original Pixel Fold and it had this form factor that was very, very different from what pretty much everybody else was doing. It is much shorter than a normal phone display. And as it was a foldable, when it opened up, it was wider than it was tall, like a true tablet. You got this really unique experience where you basically had what a lot of people have wanted, a compact flagship phone, which is smaller, right? So a smaller form factor phone. But then when you needed a bigger screen, you could open it up and you have a huge, huge screen. And because it was a wider open screen like this, it kind of felt like Surface Duo. It was great for split screen and applications.

And then what did Google do? They started their normal tinkering and they completely changed everything about it with the second iteration. Gone is that kind of short wide aspect ratio and instead what we have is the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which looks like every other foldable on the planet. It is a normal phone screen on the front and when you open it, what you get is basically a very large square.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think this is a really good phone and it has grown on me to some degree. I actually think it's very, very good. But man, I can't lie to you and say that I don't really miss this form factor. Every time I pick this thing up to do something with it, I actually test betas and things like that on it now. Every time I pick it up, I'm just like, "I love this phone." They gave us one generation of this form factor and then they started tinkering and they threw it out and they went to something completely different.

4. Chromecast with Google TV Controller

So this last one is, I think, so endemic of Google's pointless tinkering. The controller for the Chromecast with Google TV. It is small, it is ergonomic, it is absolutely fine. I’ve used it more than long enough to build muscle memory and get used to it.

Then I bought their new Google TV Streamer and you look at it and you think, "Oh, it's the same controller, it's just a little bit bigger, right? They've just kind of made the thing a little bit larger." But here's the truth. Yes, it is larger, but the reason that it's larger is because they took the volume buttons that were on the side of the controller before and they moved them to the front of the device and put it just sort of in the middle of the other buttons.

And because of this, a few months on now, I am still continuing to try and hit the volume on the side of the controller. It was a place you could feel it, you could find it in the dark, you didn't even have to look for it. Now it's right here with all these other buttons. My muscle memory is absolutely failing me.

Why move the volume keys? We've gotten used to where they were and then you just move them to the front of the controller for no reason.

Again, this is endemic of Google's tinkering. They do things where you look at it and you just go, "How is that better?" It's just different. Different doesn't mean better.” If you've put out a product and people have gotten used to things being a certain way, different needs to be an obvious improvement, or else it's actually bad. If it's neutral, if it doesn't improve the experience at all, it's bad because you've confused people. It has to be an obvious benefit.

And so often Google does things that there is no obvious benefit. They're just moving things around for the sake of moving things around. And it drives me crazy, guys.