The new Google Pay repeats all the same mistakes of Google Allo | Hacker News Reader

The new Google Pay repeats all the same mistakes of Google Allo

arstechnica.com

360 pointsfeross308 comments

I own a Google Pixel 3a.

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.

This is the actual state of google and android right now. Not missing my pixel 2.

What part of Google Photos is discontinued?

Unlimited storage?

The unlimited plan

I think he means that uploads beyond your free Google storage are not free anymore, not even for Pixel users.

Isn't it grandfathered in though?

Photos stored in original quality are counted towards your max, only photos in reduced quality taken with a Pixel device are grandfathered and do not count.

I think all photos with reduced quality are grandfathered.

I'm pretty sure they changed that just recently.

https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/

> Starting June 1, 2021, any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account or the additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member.

> Any photos or videos you’ve uploaded in High quality before June 1, 2021 will not count toward your 15GB of free storage. This means that photos and videos backed up before June 1, 2021 will still be considered free and exempt from the storage limit.

Maybe we understand the word differently, but to me that says that (existing) high-quality photos are indeed grandfathered (they will not suddenly start using your quota), just not new ones you upload after June.

Correct.

Reading further up this comment chain:

"I think he means that uploads beyond your free Google storage are not free anymore, not even for Pixel users."

Future photos, after June, will not be "grandfathered". Only existing ones are. This is the part of the service that has been canceled.

Great, way to screw your users and strongarm them into paying for storage. I'm salty.

planned software obsolescence ?

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.

This. This is one of the biggest reasons I switched to iPhone.

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.

Android is a mess.

You can remove them, but it's a pain and you need to either be a developer or have technical knowledge

Don't forget that one time when one of the apps became an addware which showed adds on the lock screen.

https://fossbytes.com/peel-remote-use-remove-smart-remote/

// just a nitpick: advertisement is just one 'd' so, as far as I know it should be ads

My Galaxy S4 on 4.4.x had this app pre-installed. I must have either rooted prior to any parasitic behaviour or attribute it to Xprivacy, as I did not encounter any ads. Regardless, not endorsing this app, just an alternative view, as it not only acted as a stopgap for a flailing universal remote, but also had a decent TV guide from what I can remember.

That one hurt when it deteriorated into adware. At its prime, it was a great app, and being able to control my TV using the IR Blaster in my HTC One M7 really felt like The Future™ for a brief couple years.

Now the app is gone and phones have removed the IR Blaster.

That app was super useful for me when I had a Note 3 with IR blaster, I had so many devices which I could control (and oddly enough, my laptop had an IR sensor). Shame to see what it turned into.

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).

> 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.

People keep making this argument, but if you go out and try and get an Android phone, it’s more likely to be Samsung or one of the Chinese brands. Even with enthusiasts Android is a commodity phone. You min-max price and features more often than not because there’s no lock in to an ecosystem.

Why buy a Samsung when Oneplus is just as cheap, and not complete junk?

Design...

Not just design. I was so excited to get a 5g oneplus 8,I'd heard great things about the 7 and 7t.

Well I went through three of them with T-mobile and all 3 had serious issues which varied, but all 3 had a very serious battery issue.

All 3 phones were new out of box, and all 3 needed to be charged multiple times per day, probably about 4 with light use. All 3 got hot, and I believe the culprit on all 3 was the front screen fingerprint reader. Upon checking advanced battery usage tab, screen took up 98% of the battery, something I've never even heard of.

Constant random reboots, loss of signal and having to reboot to re-obtain, so hot it was uncomfortable to hold or have in pocket.

I thought about getting a 7t McLaren or whatever, but decided against it due to lack if 5g at the time.

I really hope they ironed out the issues because I'm definitely over Samsung and can't wait to get rid of my current S20+. And the 8 was really a joy to use, wasn't even the pro version and seemed far faster than my s20. Shoot, it took me three failures to finally be forced to try another phone.

Edit: fix words.

I have a OnePlus 8t since last october and have not found any issue on the battery side. On the contrary I'm quite pleased with battery management since i can charge it in 30 minutes from 0 to almost 100%, so usually i just charge it for 5-10 minutes and I can use it all day easily.

With full charge on average I get around a day or two without recharging with mostly firefox, youtube, messaging apps open and some light gaming.

Battery saving mode gets me almost 1 hour more of usage when I'm at 15%

Haven't really had any signal problems and 5g isn't that much of an improvement around where I live so it's not really a concern for me but ymmv

Well, for one they just had to jump aboard the bandwagon and drop the headphone jack. Samsung did that too on some models, but at least they still have the option.

I mean, I'm not everyone but I can and do both buy and recommend phones with close to stock android, even if they are more expensive.

Like Sony and Motorola used to be pretty good about that.

Problem is, it's hard to search those phone finder sites for "Android purity" so I have to dig deep to find out how bad it will even be. The more fancy features listed on the manufacturers marketing page the more confident I can be that the features are all preinstalled spyware that might offer a cute gimmick as a bribe, at best.

FWIW the only two apps that my S20 came with that I wish were uninstallable are the Tips app and the Samsung calendar app, and there is a good reason for the latter (if a user managed to delete all calendar apps on Android the OS does not like that at all). They're pretty trivial to hide.

But some people might have to accept the presence of a Facebook shim for installation is such an incredibly mainstream proposition that they are in a vanishingly small minority wanting rid of it.

The comment that kicked off this whole thread is about the Pixel 3a being a mess, so while I'll agree that Samsung and their Android version are a mess, Google isn't exactly helping here either

> Android is a mess.

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.

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.

I wasn't actually sure so I looked it up. According to wayback machine, it was indeed advertised:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210104200400/https://store.goo...

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.

3rd party browser on iOS with web notifications (like android) would translate into a huge profit loss in app sales.

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.

You can also combine that with a DNS-level ad-blocking pseudo-VPN running on the device (like a pi-hole but without the pi). That gets rid of most in-app ads and a ton of tracking.

Yep, you could set it up via https://apple.nextdns.io/

Aren't content blockers limited in some regard? I think I read that one content blocker can only have a limited list of blocks.

uBlock on Firefox doesn't have that limitation, and if you use Firefox on desktop you can important synchronization between those.

Yes and no. Content blockers have a limited number of rules and you’re fundamentally limited by the expressiveness of the filtering language.

But:

* The filtering language is basically just ABP rules.

* There is only a cap per “extension” so apps with lots of rules just expose many extensions.

Safari content blockers are significantly limited compared to ublock origin. You're limited to domain allow/deny rules, and a quite small amount of those per app (less than a couple hundred thousand I think) and IIRC can't inject cosmetic filters either. These are critical drawbacks.

Afaik I can block all cookies or advertising cookies, I can rotate my ID, block all pop-ups, and or sit behind a Pi-Hole. Some ideas for switching.

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)

Consider WebKit with 1Blocker: https://1blocker.com/

It depends if you want to hack around on the phone.

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 is there a way to search for an app that is installed or should I still browse a long list and play "finding nemo"?

The iPhone does have a search for apps. Plus they now also will group your apps into categories on the last screen.

And apps like Google Photos on the iPhone do upload photos in the background.

They do upload in the background, but they don't notice new photos while being in the background.

You need to start the app and only then they will notice the new photos. (my life is miserable because my wife has iPhone and I have to deal with strange limits on iOS).

>Android allows app to read gps status, do background stuff that is impossible on iPhone:

You are very much behind the times here. The newer Android (since 10 I think?) behavior for the last 2 years are permission prompts just like Apple. In fact many apps are not allowed to request background location updates anymore either.

But there are still apps that have permission to run location service in the background e.g. Tasker, GPSLogger.

I'm on Android 11.

> - you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

You can. I use PhotoSync to upload my photos in the background to my Nextcloud server via WebDav. Nextcloud and Dropbox have their own special functionality to automatically upload photos in the background.

> you can't upload photos using e.g. Google Photos or Nextcloud in the background

You can certainly upload/sync to your personal NAS at home with third-party apps. Many of my beta users use Resilio Sync, PhotoSync, or SyncThing. Synology and QNAP both have their own proprietary sync apps as well.

Nope, it does not work. Tried it, it appears to work for first time and then you notice that if the app is not launched in the foreground after you take a photo it won't notice it.

I use AdGuard Pro on an iPhone and it blocks all ads in Safari.

You can uninstall any app by using adb shell:

    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

A friend of mine used to say "Is your grandma so senile that she can't type `configure; make; make install`?"

The problem GP is pointing at is that uninstalling an unwanted app shouldn't be hard like that.

It's kind of unfortunate how the "easy" works.

For a programmer sitting in front of a desktop that already has Linux on it, following those instructions would take less than five minutes. Easy.

For a typical Android user, they wouldn't know what they were looking at even if they had a Linux machine, which they don't. And would then get turned around by a simple typo like "apt-get-install" instead of "apt-get install" if they even make the attempt.

But because it's already "easy" for the people with the expertise to make it easier, the only people who could solve the problem are the people not experiencing it.

Arguably you can download SDK Platform tools much the same on Windows/Mac.

This command does not however always work (or at least wouldn't for some bundled software in older Androids).

> the only people who could solve the problem are the people not experiencing it.

Its more that companies provide some hard to use escape hatch for their anti features which silences all criticism "You just run this command" while still keeping it out of the hands of the normal user. The problem has already been solved, you don't have to run abd to remove apps on android, unless the app is specifically preventing you from using this feature.

I generally agree with you, nonetheless someone just released this:

https://github.com/A2L5E0X1/debloat-adb

Sometimes the scripts on xda-developers come bundled with an older adb version specifically because they don't expect people to know how to install it themselves.

Although, on a second thought if a user then decides to run the `debloat-google.sh` without knowing what he does the user might end up quite frustrated as a result. So I guess you're right.

I think google has been gradually restricting what adb is able to do.

Given the billions of Android devices in the developing world, "typical Android user" possibly doesn't have a computer at all.

This could be done by a service person in a mobile repair / paraphernalia shop.

> A friend of mine used to say "Is your grandma so senile that she can't type `configure; make; make install`?"

Who writes makefiles such that 'make install' doesn't have 'all' (or whatever the default target is) as a dependency? It's even mean these days not to automatically configure with the default options if no configuration has previously been specified.

Thus grandma should really only have to do the much simpler

    (mkdir /tmp/granny; cd /tmp/granny; curl https://my.example.com/download/latest.gz|tar xfpBz - ; cd * ; make install)

I can't believe grandma is so oblivious to security she'd just blindly download and build a random tarball without manually inspecting the code for backdoors.

How has she made it this far in life?

Damn thing was probably written in Ruby and she can't keep up with the times. Be kind, and only send her links to packages in something simpler like C++ or CommonLisp.

granny misses the simplicity and readability of COBOL

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 :/

By and large they aren't full apps, they're small shims, but ultimately this a decision that Google took when they started misusing the system designation for apps to mean all of "should come back on hard reset" and "should have full admin permissions beyond userland" and "should be difficult to remove because you'll bork the OS services" at the same time.

I've no problem with the basic concept of built-in apps that provide a standard base set of capabilities. For example I'm fine with Microsoft putting a default browser in Windows 10 that you can't uninstall, or Apple building Safari into iOS. User unintentionally deleting the app and from their POV getting locked out of the internet would be bound to happen.

On the other hand clearly carriers and vendors loading up their products with crapware and junk is a serious problem. Lets be clear though, this is about poor judgement, bad execution and incentives that are severely miss-aligned between vendor and customer. It's not fundamentally a technical issue.

You may want to warm up your SO to a something like lineage os. Hoping they haven't gotten too spoilt by Oppo's tools, banking and netflix pretty much work okay on these alternative softwares.

Better else - disable

  adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.samsung.android.email.provider

Why disabling is better than remove/uninstall?

You can't uninstall what was burned into the OEM ROM, only disable them so they no longer run nor get updates.

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 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.

... or, of course, hit the phone repeatedly with a hammer.

Not sure if this should be taken seriously or in jest!

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.

This kind of shit makes me really wish I had donated more to all of the pure linux phone projects of the past. They call this thing a smart "phone" but the "phone" part is the least advanced thing about it. Smart means it runs a bunch of apps but none of them actually advance what a phone should do: namely record calls - with auto prompts to make it legal, block spam.

Instead I'm inundated with societal shit: amber and silver alerts at 2am (yes I have been woken up when my phone was on silent in the middle of the fucking night. What the fuck am I going to do while I'm boondocking in the middle of the ari-fucking-zona desert to help a child abducted by a dad at 2 am in the state of Washington - but the parent's are originally from Phoenix?)

I'm so damn sick of Android.

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 don't know about the great grandparent comment's author, but for me this info is both interesting and potentially useful. Thanks, grandparent comment!

No need for root?

Works without root

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.

> 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.

Which is the case for Google Photos. It is also a messenger (not kidding), shows notifications with "moments" it automatically created from your photos, lets you create photo books which you can order and so on.

I would prefer a smaller default gallery app with Google Photos being an optional extra.

Why do you expect that? I've never seen a smartphone that behaved how you expect. Except for stuff like the pinephone, which couldn't be used as a phone for awhile.

I mean, that's the point: the smartphone ecosystem is broken. It was built wrong in the first place.

Some missinformation on my side:

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.

I just uninstalled Google Music by dragging it to the trash on my Pixel 4a. I'm super annoyed about the YouTube music switcheroo myself fwiw

Wow so Google Play Music won't even play MP3s, crazy. I never quite realized it was more than a music player.

I'm still bitter about Google Play Music being killed for YouTube Music. YouTube Music has been worse in every single way.

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.

Install grapheneos! My pixel 3a is rocking it, yours should too ;)

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

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).

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.

It looks like Google doesn't have a partner-development/business-development muscle the way Apple does.

Probably now part of the institutional culture and impossible to eliminate.

> 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.

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.

Too large a company. Their cross-team is like other's cross-company.

It makes you wonder, what’s the incentive to have a promo structure that only favours launching new features.

Is it that new products/features == growth in share value for shareholders?

Anything that helps distract the public from the fact that they're an ad company is good for Google and their shareholders.

> I'm honestly surprised shareholders haven't started asking questions about the serious mismanagement of capital allocation.

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.

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.

yup, spot on. Google is now where Microsoft was at the height of "Windows on every desktop". From the outside at least, Sundar Pichai's leadership looks increasingly like Steve Balmer's: operational management by numbers. Quarter on glowing quarter of extensive profit to keep the analysts and investment funds happy. But under the covers, no obvious progress on anticipating, or even creating, "next". It almost killed Microsoft, saved only when Balmer was pushed out.

Yes. Google sort of reminds me of Saudi Arabia, economically.

If only Saudi Aramco IPO'd they could have diversified with that capital, now it's the usual business plus some fantasy high tech 'planned city'. Was it all an ambitious failed dream?

Murdering dictatorships seem to have a problem letting go of control. So I'm saying yes, they had the wrong people advising them.

Ignoring the giant elephant that Saudi Arabia didn't even feign "don't be evil", in order to engage in global market capital. Not even temporarily during the IPO, they could have put on their good face to the western world.

Instead the top down crafting this IPO gave the "okay" to murder to WaPo journalist and create a global PR disaster because their feelings got hurt.

Yet as you mention they still need to diversify, eventually. I wonder how it all will turn out looking back in 5-10yrs.

I read somewhere the other day that Hydrogen was Saudi's new plan, or maybe another plan.

The grim reality is that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi probably wouldn't have materially influenced the IPO price. (Trump did not care after all.)

Google, Amazon, etc.

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.

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.

I know it's not a perfect solution, but you should be able to create a Gmail account just for NFC payments.

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.

That's a shame. Google Pay is really the only thing keeping me on the Stock ROM. Maybe it's a good time to move to lineage.

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.

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.

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.

Erm... your contactless debit card doesn't show information either. The information is on the POS terminal.

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)

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.

No, but local authentication before authenticating any payment is possible within the limitations of the protocol.

Amount and payee authentication is unfortunately not. It would require updating all payment terminals in the field – the last time we tried that (i.e. introducing chip support) it took literally decades (and we're still not done).

> does that mean we should make the app not bother to get your finger print and just have nfc on all the time?

You don't need to unlock your phone to pay amounts under 30€ in my country. You just need the screen to be on.

I'm quite glade it's like this actually. If I had to fiddle with the phone every time I wanted to pay, I would just use my card.

> Contactless debit cards can be skimmed without being authd too;

nitpicking, but contactless cards as far as I am aware cannot be "skimmed" (a process of copying the information from a magnetic stripe and creating a cloned card). If the payment terminal can handle a chip, it will refuse to downgrade the security. In addition, countries are marked as chip only, which means it's almost impossible to get a bank to authorise a transaction for a card that should have a chip in a country where most readers are chip-capable. And if the card was suddenly used in a non-chip region, any good bank would block it.

All you can do with contactless is relay the signal over the internet, but that introduces delay and can sometimes be detected by the reader.

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.

> 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?

One example is at the gas station I have to tap/swipe my card to activate the pump and then I get charged when I'm done.

Gas stations are an exception: They will usually pre-authorize a certain amount (usually some number that is not likely to be exceeded by reasonable gas tank sizes) and adjust downwards once the final amount is known.

This is different from having different amounts in the chip transaction and in the "actual" transaction amount fields.

This was annoying when gas prices were very high. We had a van with a massive tank and the pre-auth wasn't enough. We would hit the limit and need to drive to the next pump to continue.

At this gas station scenario, you have two transactions - the preauth, verified by the card, with a specific limit; and afterwards a transaction (not verified or even seen by the card) with the actual amount.

The former is something that the card/phone can show and verify, as that is the actual amount you're authorising, even if you don't "spend" all of it.

In some stores you can tap your card before the transaction is completed, once the receipt is 'closed' the payment terminal will receive the final amount and use the authorized session to complete the payment.

You can also simply wait for the receipt to be closed before tapping, then the terminal will show you the full amount.

I - for example - use the pre-transaction tapping when buying groceries, it means I can just walk out when the last item is scanned.

It is a security risk - an attacker may add some expensive item to the session - but I think I can take it, the terminal will still show the total at transaction close.

This is not related to taxes as far as I understand. I's just that for legacy magnetic stripe payments, there is no dynamic element to the transaction data, which in practice allows the customer to swipe while the cashier is still ringing up items.

Accordingly, this is what customers have become used to, and this assumption has been further baked into POS software.

Rather than forcing all POS vendors and customers to change this habit, the EMV standard was relaxed for the US (and a few other markets where this is common) to not necessarily include the final transaction amount in the payment data signed by the chip.

This used to be common with tips at restaurants. The would take your card to the back and swipe it, then come back with the receipt. The receipt had a box for a tip. When you left they would then charge the card for the total including the tip.

With chip cards restaurants now tend to bring the card machine to the table. This way you can enter the tip on the machine and complete the payment without the card leaving your hand. I don't know if this is because the machine is there anyways or because chip payments need to know the amount when the transaction is authorized.

The machine is just a fancy new toy, although it does have the added benefit of your card not leaving your control. It's still possible to put the tip in after your chip card has been read.

This is a different thing: The tip is usually reconciled only during payment capture time (which is a batch process and distinct from the authorization stage).

In some countries, the switch from signature to PIN has coincided with the introduction of chip cards, and given that the terminal needs to be brought to the customer anyway for those (or vice versa), it's just simpler for everyone involved to include the tip amount right there.

I have yet to be in a restaurant in the US where they bring the reader to the table. I wish they would, but I've never seen it (Minnesota, US, other places in the Midwest).

The ones here will do it if you want to pay via phone *Pay. Obviously not every restaurant has updated to that though, especially mom and pop joints. I usually leave the tip in cash anyway. Covid has put an end to my restaurant visits for a while though except the occasional outdoor place.

What? Every restaurant I go to still takes the chip card and uses it. If you want to pay via phone *Pay they'll bring out a wireless POS to finish the transaction, if they support phone pay at all.

These guys want instant feedback rather than checking a ledger later that day or night. This seems like paranoia to me after using *Pay for several years now. Ask for your receipt if you're nervous about it.

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.

> 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.

>The terminal is an untrusted device.

Untrusted by who? You?

The terminal is a trusted device in the payment system, and in most cases is the only trusted device in the store involved in the payment chain.

It may be trusted by the store or the payment provider but I most certainly don't trust the terminal in a random store. It could be fake or modified and I would have no way to know. I can't trust it to show me the correct amount.

You have a fair point but this tool is actually meant to be a software translation of contactless cards and it's 1-1 that. Neither Apple nor Google Pay thought to reimplement given the new tools they have available.

If I had to guess, I would say it is because they wanted to support some use-case that contactless cards currently do: presumably like I can pay at Safeway before knowing the amount - a feature I use very often to speed up the process.

For sure. It is far more important for the phone payments to have widespread adoption than improving security. I don't blame them for that. However it would be cool if they could start adding security features. I can imagine that your use case could be solved by signing to token such as "Up to $500 in the next 6h" or something. You could be promoted on your phone and approve it.

In fact I would like the whole credit card system to be overhauled or replaced with a different system that gives consumers much more control over the access they give companies. Sure, some companies like online stores I might give full access like I do today as I plan to make many future purchases with different values, but I can also see a lot of uses for more restricted access like fixed monthly subscriptions and one time fixed-cost payments that don't give them access to charge me later.

Certainly, I imagine it's a product decision weighing security and convenience.

How do you pay for things when not using the phone system (which you explicitly refuse to use)? I'm curious what system of electronic payment you believe is trustworthy if the payment terminal is not.

I do use it. All I am saying is that you can't trust anything the terminal tells you. The only way to be sure what you paid is checking the statements at the end of the month and requesting chargebacks if anything isn't correct.

If it's fake or modified, it will not have the ability to communicate with the payment network and process the transaction.

Wait till you see what happens when you swipe, insert or tap a credit/debit card.

> 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:

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.

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.

> 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.

Scratch cards "drawing dates" several days after the transaction. Enough time to figure out ring transactions. Google once targeted a friend by making his meal nearly free. He talked about that to several friends for months. His circle got much smaller rewards. Its not truly random.

The link above, which has data from NPCI, says it processed Rs 1,61,418.19 crore in Nov, 2nd only to PhonePe at Rs 1,75,453.85 crore.

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…

> 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.

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.

> in India, thanks to UPI you can pay anybody if you know their phone number

Or their UPI ID. it looks something like "myname@bankname"

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.

Only thanks to the government making it a requirement. We would still be stuck in the stone age if it was up to the banks to organize this themselves.

In Poland such system (Blik) was created by cooperation of multiple banks. You can pay online, in stores, withdraw cash from ATM or just send money P2P using other person phone number. It works like 2FA (you have to enter code generated in app on pinpad and confirm on phone) so it's a bit more of a hussle than qr codes, but... it just works.

I exclusively pay with Gpay these days here in India.

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).

I know. Only the account discovery works way better if your adhar and mobile number are linked to all your accounts. I've seen it fail otherwise.

Banks cannot store Aadhaar numbers and allow it to be used for or enable better discovery. Phone number linked to the account is what’s important. Aadhaar is required only if/when receiving government subsidies in one’s bank account. It has nothing to do with person to person transfers.

> 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.

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.

My bank integrates with this service, which seems to let you send money to anyone via their phone or email: https://www.zellepay.com/

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.

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.

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.

Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.

Unfortunately DDG is really only useful for english search results. I tried running it as my default search engine, but in most places it's more or less useless.

Great for non-english results for me, I simply search with !ddgde which flips the "Germany"-switch to on.

You and others keep saying this, but you really need to mention which non-English languages you are talking about as at least some of them are pretty good.

Ok, but google just works for me if i type english or german queries. DDG doesn't.

I've been using ddg as a default engine and wasn't aware of this. (also !ddgde is a lot more to type than !g)

Completely opposite experience: German Google brings up so much irrelevant things when searching in English.

They show a switch for me even when I search in English.

With google, I sometimes wish I had an easy switch like that when the terms are also available in English as currently this makes their results useless.

!ddgde is indeed a bit long, but as most of my searches are not local, I can live with it ;)

Chinese? Japanese? Probably a huge amount of LTR languages?

It's not "You and others keep saying this... provide some examples".

It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.

> It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.

No, that’s something you put into my mouth.

This is why I was asking. Unlike others, I explained which language works great. "Doesn’t work" is useless without saying what it doesn’t work for. "Does/Doesn’t work for language X" is actually relevant information.

From my experience, it’s not great with queries in French, but it is not terrible either. I tend to use g! much more in French than English.

Non trivial queries are answered from Bing index. So it is not really "much more than" it.

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.)

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)

Bing is pretty good though. The results are different from Google's but not necessarily worse or better.

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.

I recently switched to an iPhone and am an Apple Maps purist now. A man can only be told to turn left at the Carl's Jr so many times before he snaps.

Google Maps cannot understand which redirection I am facing when the navigation just starts while Apple Maps does it beautifully.

That’s honestly the most important portion of trip. I don’t need to be navigated once I am driving on the highway.

Seriously? I bought in-car navigation for my car instead of opting for CarPlay/AndroidAuto for this exact reason. When I start a trip, my phone (always used Google Maps) can never figure out which way I am facing and will keep rotating around and recalculating directions until I gather some speed on the road. With my in-car navigation, the compass works flawlessly even in parking garages and basements. I though the holy grail would be a UX where Google Maps would use its maps, traffic and navigation data while using the car's GPS.

Try Apple Maps if you have an iPhone, you’ll be surprised.

The best part about Apple Maps is it gives you directions before its too late. Google Maps would tell me to cross 4 lanes to turn within the next 20m.

The voice is also much more natural sounding than Google Maps

> 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.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.

My complaints were just for my personal exposure to Google.

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.

Bing will almost by definition be “better” than DDG because DDG explicitly does not collect as much personalized information about you. Bing searches should be more relevant than DDG searches.

The whole point of DDG is that I do not want a hyper personalized search experience, which may lead to worse top results, but probably not stop me from finding what I want within the first page of results, which for me is a more than great trade off for protecting my privacy.

Personally, I've given up on results quality. It ranges from bad (Google) to worse (Bing) to barely usable (DDG).

Even if it's barely usable, I'm tired of the constant tracking and ads. Anyways, Google is already so full of SEO spam that I usually have to type in "[search term] [relevant web site]", and even DDG can handle that.

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)

I really miss the GPhotos / GDrive connection.

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...

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.

No shit, it's just someone's project to get a promotion, again. Nobody cares, nobody will use it, and it'll go into the graveyard in a year or two.

Why would it be less successful compared to Apple Pay? Isn't it the same functionality?

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.)

There's apps that let you add store cards to Apple Wallet. Once added they stay there, even if the app isn't installed.

I definitely had my membership cards migrated to the new app. I can see them by clicking on the credit card displayed next to my user icon in the top right. This opens a new screen with the loyalty cards listed at the bottom.

The new app supports membership cards and at least personally they were migrated from the old app.

https://support.google.com/googlepay/topic/10167683?hl=en

* I work at Google but not on Google Pay

(Can't believe we have to use "old"/"new" delimiters here either, while Google gets to pretend it's the same thing.)

Well, there's also the "old old" Google Pay...or Wallet, or whatever it was called when I tried to use it. That didn't work well, thereby helping to accelerate the end of my Android experiment. But apparently, according to a friend at the time, the new Google Pay worked much better. But not well enough, obviously, because now Google is rolling a "new new" Google Pay.

I quit using a lot of Microsoft products because of rebranding bullshit like this. Which one do I use, and why is this one better? Oh, if I'm going to go to all that trouble, I'll just try a different product entirely, then.

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.

According to this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/lztb4f/the_new_goo...

> (...) 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(!).

Thanks for the link.

I mean they still got hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.

The picture in the article is literally money being flushed down a toilet lol.

But yes we all get paid, almost always whether the software (or product) is good or bad or useful to the world.

> Existing Google Pay users are about to go through a transition reminiscent of the recent move from Google Music to YouTube Music: Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service.

Yeah but I'm sure that dev team used the latest technology, like Flutter or Kotlin or something, and had an excellent well paid team.

Now the repo isn't some old dirty Java codebase either (made by another team of half-genuises 5yrs ago, gross!). Don't want our users having to deal with old codebases, with all of those fully battle-tested features and quirks figured out (yawn), written in some boring language and using old frameworks! It's bad for business.

IIRC this app is indeed made with Flutter.

It's the flagship product for Flutter 2.

At least someone might have been promoted by driving the Flutter rewrite effort.

https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-f...

I occasionally use Google Pay on my phone (by way of a credit card added to the app), but I'm in Australia and have no idea if this story impacts me.

In fact, I have no idea if the 'Google Pay' that I know and use is the same as the one mentioned in this story. Do people in other countries have different apps from google, but named the same as my local apps? That's pretty confusing. I cannot see any P2P (person to person?) features in my app, just the 'add credit or debit card' functionality.

If I traveled to India and saw Google Pay was supported at a checkout, I'd absolutely try and use my app.. but perhaps would be in for a bad time. Who knows?

Same in the UK. The Google Pay app on my phone allows me to add credit cards and use them for NFC payments and that's about it. I can't see a way to send money to someone else using it either.

You can find the canonical name of your installed "Google Pay" if you click on "Share" in the app view of Google Play.

I live in Europe and had the same reaction as you, and I have com.google.android.apps.walletnfcrel installed, which shows up as the mentioned (old app) in the US Play store[1]. So I guess, as usual with Google: Maybe we're affected?

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

New new one [1] says "This app is not available for your device" so it seems it can be anything from "we're not affected" to "we're affected much more than US". :-/

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

How can so many highly-paid and bright employees routinely fuck up products so terribly and so often? It boggles the mind.

It might be because of the "so many" part.

I wonder what the product manager hiring process and role is like at Google. Leet-code doesn't necessarily help you maintain a healthy product road map.

Many (not all) of those kids are great at playing the "getting credentials" games, not so good at the "let's make a great product" game. The objectives are not 100% aligned either.

A significant problem with intelligent people is that they're repeatedly told they're good at everything throughout their early life, but being clever doesn't automatically make you good at everything. Some things take experience and knowledge that takes years to attain. Tech is full of people who did well at school, went to a good university and did great, and then went to work at a tech company. They have no experience of the world outside of their very limited experiences. But they don't realise that. So they fuck products up a lot because outside of tech people couldn't give a damn about the same things clever nerds give a damn about.

The reason I know this is because I was the same. I did well at school, did well at university, got good jobs in tech, and then tried to do a startup and failed hard because I wasn't nearly as clever as I thought I was, and I had completely misunderstood the product I tried to make. It was quite the lesson.

In my opinion, being clever or "bright" means having high intellect, retaining information and making the necessary mind connections, but it doesn't automatically means intelligence.

You can be considered bright by other people or some metrics, yet make very poor life choices.

Being good at math and physics for example doesn't make you good at HCI. I learned this by being forced to take an HCI course in grad school and learning how much I didn't know about the area.

Another problem is again wrong incentives. If a product usage isn't in the hundreds of millions the management usually does the "move fast, break things, launch the new thing, get promoted, switch teams, rinse and repeat" approach which is a time tested strategy.

As someone who hates phone number based authentication, I'm surprised how much the author hates phone number based authentication.

Whatsapp won because it realised for normal people phone number based authentication is way way easier than username/password. It's almost impossible to hack, can't forget your password, and it's way easier to use.

> It's almost impossible to hack

It's actually extremely easy to hack in a targeted manner...

You can either do it with social engineering at range or even intercept the sms if you're physically close enough to the recipient

But for most people it’s more secure since they can’t reuse the same password everywhere

I'm sure one can come up with more social engineering tactics, but if we talk about countries where people have and use proper documents, the American style sim swap is unheard of.

Those documents are not that hard to forge though.

It's simply more likely that the US has more high value targets, has more criminals/grifters doing this kind of fraud/scam, and non-US media talks less about these identity theft events.

I'm sure U.S has more valuable targets, but it's not the document itself that has to be fake in quite a few countries out there, you would also need forged chips etc. that go with it. Rogue employee is way easier than going this route. Self identification in the USA is way behind the world, the archaic voting system is a good example of it.

Why would you need to forge chips? (At least in Hungary even though the phone shop takes your plastic card and puts it into a photocopier, but they don't validate the chip in it. As far as I know.)

I agree that the US' lack of federally issued modern and safe credentials that then tie into the private sector is laughably painful. (But it's not like the rest of the world is that much better.)

The actual US voting systems are pretty okay (mail ballots, extremely low voter fraud, results are counted in a few days), the way that turns into representation is the problem. The usual news about voter ID laws are pure fascist voter suppression.

If it's pure fascist voter supression then whole Europe takes part of it as well? Besides the UK I guess who are similar to Americans when it comes to voting.

Every single argument against their current system and arguments against ID is what we all do here? Think you're too deep into their political rhetoric here and peddle misinformation.

It's not the same. Voter ID laws in the US specifically (but not explicitly) target black and low-income demographics, who are far more likely to not have such ID documents. If having such documents was a long-standing requirement to function in society like it is in much of Europe (as far as I've heard), then it wouldn't be as big a deal.

All the arguments I've read from cost to where the get them apply to Europe as well? I'm sure homeless people here as well tend to not have renewed documents if you talk about class.

I'm sure it's still a problem everywhere on some level, but not as big of a problem as it is in the US where large swaths of the population don't have sufficient ID documents.

Enforcing ID checks is essentially voter suppression if some groups of voters have them and some groups don't. In countries with universal (or even mandatory) IDs, doing the same isn't really voter suppression.

I have no problem with requiring ID, even if it helps basically nothing with election security, but sure, let's do it. But let's do it in a way that doesn't disenfranchise vulnerable/disadvantaged groups. So appropriate funds, have some transitory period, etc.

Is it possible outside of the US? In Europe I need an ID card to get or replace a SIM card. Though that’s maybe different now that all stores are closed due to the pandemic.

Nope, in France Bouygues Telecom required only a 10euro payment ( cash accepted too) to issue a new SIM card, which wasn't even in my name.

Yeah, that doesn't sound great...

Anyone who works at your operator can pull this off, or anyone that can bribe one of the former.

Then there are other ways to achieve the same thing without SIM swaps. SS7 level rerouting can be done globally ("this phone is now roaming from within our network").

Right, but not at scale, whereas you can just get a leaked password list and get access to 1000 random accounts easily.

For the average user having no password is 100x more secure than the rubbish password they picked.

For the high value target the opposite is hopefully true, then again solarwinds123

When using android you would most likely be signed in to google already.

It's an utter pain in the butt if you lose or break your phone. It's also a problem if you travel a lot.

Google pay looked cool but I never bothered because I knew google has this bad habit of messing up perfectly fine things that just work.

Meh, I guess I was right.

So at this point I just ignore new google stuff.

Even assuming that they're any good, google itself will mess them up eventually.

I can't speak for other countries, but at least in India it has been a huge success. At this point I think it is even bigger then PayTM.

When it was first released it was very smooth compared to all the competition and the cashback was also pretty good.

But just a few months ago they released a new update (GPay) and I don't know what they did but it is now unbearably slow. Checking bank balance only works in 2 or 3 tries and transactions can fail multiple times. Instead of focusing on that they decided to make an UI update that made the interface incredibly slow. Unbelievable.

I have moved on to PayTM for now (it is much better), but I will continue to keep an eye on it. Maybe it will get better.

> I don't know what they did but it is now unbearably slow

There was this announcement about GPay is reimplemented in Flutter. It could be related to that.

Yeah, I also noticed that on the app version when it was released.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315915

I don't know why they would ruin such a fast, successful app like this.

Flutter applications start insanely slowly. I only tried it once and a tiny, one-screen app with barely any interactivity took like 2.5 seconds to load on a Snapdragon 845 phone.

The culture of "Promotion-oriented development" is a dismay across this industry. My take is that the prospect of getting promoted to Principal/Staff SE is close to none if you are not aiming for a moon-shot project. Naturally, people tend to just invent "just-another-moonshot" project for the sake of getting a promotion instead of thinking about the long-term implication of such decision.

No mention of the previous Google Pay fuck-up, which graced us with two apps: "Google Pay" and "Google Pay Send."

I still haven't figured that one out, and I'm not going to bother with whatever the hell this is.

The distinction absolutely makes sense from a product perspective; they serve two very different purposes.

The mistake was naming them both "Google Pay".

Has there even been a successful new Google product in the past 5 years?

Google has a magic money fountain so they can afford to fail with new products. Besides a lot of the products were 'successful' for the employees who received pay rises and promotions

Considering their record financials and stock value, I'd say they had at least some successful products in last 5 years :)

Great! But can you name any?

Those are existing products. I can't think of a new thing they have started that has gone well recently. Excluding renames like moving nexus to pixel.

I bet Kodak also had some of its best financial results right before it was plunged into obscurity.

Blackberry is an example. They went almost straight from records to collapse.

Their barrier for success is so high they kill off anything before it even has a chance. Look at Stadia was it even out a year before it was effectively canned?

Imagine if Microsoft had taken that approach when they built Xbox, they knew some products are a marathon not a race.

Starting to wonder if any of the decision makers there even remember what the early moments of a product can be like.

>Imagine if Microsoft had taken that approach when they built Xbox, they knew some products are a marathon not a race.

Xbox nearly died in development, as Bill Gates was none too pleased with the decision. Fries recalls Microsoft's "Valentine's Day Massacre" in which Bill Gates furiously ripped apart the development team for circumventing his original idea.

https://gamerant.com/bill-gates-xbox-story/

Stadia wasn't canned. They shut down their first party game studio that was making exclusive title for the platform.

But yeah, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence either...

It was effectively canned. Without first party exclusive games to bring people onto the system it has no chance of success.

Duo and YouTube TV come to mind.

Edit: Photos is 2015, so just over 5 years old.

Successful was the key metric.

Out of those 3, I'd vote only Photos is successful. Whilst completely anecdotal, I don't know anyone that uses Duo or YTTV.

Located in Australia.

YTTV isn't available in Australia, so...

Google has reached it's terminal innovation phase, it cannot seem to launch and maintain coherent products. It's bureaucracy from here on in.

The CEO is a McKinsey consultant, smart guy, nice, but he's a politician on top of what are layers of well-meaning politicians.

Google was never a highly organized company, which was advantageous the start, but eventually the lack of real corporate product discipline overcomes the ability of the otherwise great product leaders to maintain coherence over time.

Even established products like YouTube, gosh it hasn't improved in a long time. The 'creator section' is abysmal and was in beta for years. Think of how much more innovation has happened in a short time on TikTok.

Most top-down orgs fail, or turn into other kinds of beasts like Oracle. Apple has been able to maintain fidelity thanks to a long-running founder who established quite a lot of cultural consistency. It's frankly weird how they fire well enough on so many cylinders but they are only 1 CEO out from the founder.

Even Microsoft's Product/Competitive focused approach has been consistent for them.

Google will still make a lot of money for now so there won't be any pressure to change for the foreseeable future but I really can't imagine anyone but the founders coming in to make that happen, but I don't think it's in their DNA.

The article it not based on concrete numbers or facts besides the author own sentiment. He didn't offer the any stats such as app store downloads, or anything else that uses facts to suggest the new Google pay us a step backwards.

Last time I read the new app was actually doing very well.

1.https://www.pymnts.com/news/mobile-payments/2020/google-pay-...

I mean they depreciate the old app and force upon us the new app. I don't think you can look too much into the download number.

At this point, Google has become a paperclip optimizer for chat apps.

That's not Google Pay's fault. The changes are mandated by financial authorities in order to fight terrorism, money laundering and child pornography.

I hadn't heard that. Any links that explain what happened?

Sorry what are the mandated changes which require phone-based authentication which can't be tied to a Google account? Which authorities? Why did this require the website to be locked down?

Because you can create a Google account anonymously. The financial law requires KYC - Know Your Customer. So that every illegal transaction can be traced to a real person.

So what's the use case for this service now that there are fees? Cross border payments? Or is the banking infrastructure in the US so terrible that people would pay to send money in a way that isn't a bank transfer?

Banking infrastructure is pretty terrible by default. Almost everywhere. It‘s 2021, instantaneous transactions should be the default. If you send a SEPA payment in Europe (most modern standard) it still takes one business day. And intercontinental transactions take even longer.

I get the whole interbank exchange weirdness, but still. Banks basically transfer money akin to using analogue switchboards.

> If you send a SEPA payment in Europe (most modern standard) it still takes one business day.

The most modern standard is SEPA Instant Credit Transfer [1] which does transfers in under 10 seconds. As of right now 57% of European payment service providers have joined with this scheme.

[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...

The most recent standard is instant, but in some countries banks take this as an opportunity to get fees. In France for example you can usually pay ~€1 to make an instant transfer, but even non-instant ones are usually much faster than one day; in the U.K. it seems everyone gets instant transfers for free.

Google seems determined to lose me as a customer altogether.

- 2013: Google kills Google Reader for RSS feeds. Never found a replacement I was as happy with.

- 2014: I loved the first version of AngularJS. Angular 2.0 was a complete rewrite of the first version. Switched to learning React instead (now I'm a huge Svelte fan, for the record.)

- 2017-2018?: Forget what it was called now, but Google's services for domains stops being free. I've got several family members on that and didn't want us to all lose Gmail, so I'm currently paying ~$6 per person and pretending our family is a "business".

- 2019: Google kills off Inbox. My email organization goes to shit. I'm trying hey.com currently, but still waiting/hoping I can use my google "business" on that so emails come from that domain, not hey.com...

- 2019: Google kills off the Works with Nest API, and my new Home Assistant installation can't talk to my smoke alarm. I cancel plans to buy a Nest Thermostat and get an EcoBee instead.

- 2019: I migrated off of Google Play Music and over to Spotify when they started dismantling the former and pushed people to use Youtube Music instead.

- 2019: Google Chrome slowly turning into surveillance software pushed me to switch back to Firefox.

- 2020: Google Fit used to track reps/rest time when weight lifting, but they removed that for some reason. Along with everything else they removed, I used FitnessSyncer to migrate all my health data to Apple Health.

- 2021: Now, the "new" Google Pay doesn't have the membership card feature from the "old" Google Pay, so I've lost all that data now. I'm going back to a wallet full of membership cards unless I can figure out how to add arbitrary cards to Apple Wallet.

I lost most of my faith in Google years ago, and they're still finding innovative ways to disappoint me.

There's an app called Stocard that can add apple wallet entries for certain types of cards.

Interesting that one of the marquee features of flutter is that the same code should work for web, but google pay's flutter re-write has dropped the web entirely. Maybe flutter is not so portable after all?

I uninstall any app that feels like the typical janks and uncanny Valley of flutter.

So, I'm never using this.

"Instead, you have to sign up for the new Google Pay using your carrier's phone number."

My preferred phone number lives in Google Voice, and I have a grandfathered T-mobile 'net30' plan, with a phone number I give to no one, prefer to never use, and only get junk calls and spam on. Which I'll probably use forever unless there's real competition again... or several cellphone technologies come out and they refuse to support newer connection types.

So instead you'd prefer to be forced to use a Google account? I feel like not having to have my financial transactions streamed through the same bannable Google account is a positive.

At least here in Switzerland I've found TWINT, which is pretty much the same as this new GPay, to be significantly more widely useable because all you need for a transfer is the phone number. It even works with iPhone users who don't necessarily have a Google account.

I find these different wishes kinda funny - neighbouring HN topic will have people complaining how everything is bound to a single Google account and this topic has people complaining why their financials aren't bound to a Google account :)

What if someone wanted to change their phone number because E.G.

retire to somewhere else?

work in another country for a bit?

evaid a stalker?

This service is destined to fail in the long term, and doesn't fit my own needs in the short term. It's all but become a personal religious level belief for me to not sign up with anything that requires a phone number.

I guess same thing happens as when someone wants to leave Google ecosystem behind.

You give people the new phone number. It's really not that hard (and I'm writing this as an expat using multiple phone numbers :) ).

>At least here in Switzerland I've found TWINT, which is pretty much the same as this new GPay

Australia has a better system called PayID. Every bank is required to be in the system and you can send money to anyone, to any bank with their phone number or email address. There is no 3rd party and no fees.

This is financial law's requirement. They need to be able to find and arrest you, in case you used your account for financing terrorism. So Google Voice probably won't cut it, they need a real number tied to your physical identity.

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