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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Google is by far one of the worst companies when it comes to support. They really don't care if you pay for their services. In fact, it seems they treat you better if you don't. The whole Gsuite integration they have going on is completely broken. You can't use google assistant or home (completely, some things work), can't use music with family sharing or YouTube red. My gsuite account also have problems connecting with my Android TV. I've tried to ask support but they just say "you're paying for those services"...

If they want to seriously compete with Apple and even Microsoft then they really have to step up their game.

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The goal of Google Apps is to allow an employer to own and manage accounts for employees. They are fundamentally limited accounts owned by someone else. Sure: you might be your own "employer" and allocate yourself an account, but that account is still subservient to the organization you set up. With this in mind, what does it mean if an employee of a company pays for a month of YouTube Red by themself and then their employer immediately fires them and deletes their account? What happens to the data stored in such an account that the user will expect to still have if they are working with a social service like Google+ and signed up "as them"? Will they get locked out of the Android TV they own when their employer deletes their accounts? Will all the IoT stuff in their home, from their lights to their thermostat, all stop working when they get fired from their job and their account revoked? The concept just doesn't make sense to use these kinds of accounts for arbitrary Google services; accounts under Google Apps should not be thought of as personal accounts to be used for personal purposes: if there is some business reason for employees of your company to need access to YouTube Red the correct way to support that in Google Apps would be some kind of organization-level per-seat license, not to allow accounts to buy YouTube Red ostensibly for themselves. You should use a personal account for personal things and use Google Apps accounts only for use cases that fit the model of "this is a work account owned by an organization that could lock me out of that account at any second and would not want me using the account to store personal data or for any personal reason", whether or not you happen to have for some reason decided to set up a one-person organization where you own the organization and have granted yourself an account.

The problem is even if you have an Gsuite account added to your phone, it disables a lot of things. For example, I have my university Google account added to my phone. That automatically disables keyboard backup and sync to my personal account. I can somewhat understand the rationale here, because you don't necessarily want private corporate data being stored in the keyboard on a personal account. But Google doesn't make a distinction between Edu accounts and Business accounts for this. For Edu accounts it's a stupid restriction, and should be something the domain admin can override, but can't.

I just want to use gmail with my own domain.

That's basically G-Suite. I've was on that platform for >10 years. It's taken about three of them to migrate away from Google. Glad I was never "all in"

What did you migrate to?

Still in progress.

Keep=>Trello Mail=>self, postfix

It's really a long post, maybe I'll do a write up

I'm not exactly sure what I'm using. I registered for a free organization years ago for my domain with gmail, and still have that. It says its G Suite in the control panel.

However, using this disables all kinds of google now functionality, and other stuff, as mentioned in the posts above.

You're in the original free Google Apps for Domains program, grandfathered. As the product has evolved, these grandfathered accounts have come along for the ride, at times with new G Suite features disabled behind a "try our paid plan for one month free" button. I don't know how many of these are left (I have one too), but they seem to occupy a weird product nether space that Google probably sees as a minor annoyance.

my company is permanently stuck at ten email accounts for this very reason.

Here's what I did. Sign in to gmail using my regular gmail account. In settings "Add a mail account" and provide gmail pop3 and smtp settings with your email address and credentials for your own domain. Now in gmail (signed in with regular gmail account) I have options for which account to send from (I can change the default for that).

At the very beginning, Google advertises it as custom domain service. And I joined due to the feature (I can get my domain email without any harassment of setting the email server). Later Google changed it to business oriented and abandoned users like me.

Eventually, I opened new account with gmail.com address.

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