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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Sigh.

Yet another service not available to Google Hosted domains.

I run my own domain, happily pay for it, for 1TB of storage for Photos, for Google Play Music, for apps, for films.

But yet constantly excluded from some services and features, and never knowing whether some features will even come to my account.

Seemingly all because I wanted to keep the same email I've had since 1997.

They could easily add this capability, default disabled, to the domain management page.

Edit: Has anyone tried it the other way around? What if I associate my credit card to my wife's regular gmail account and get the family plan there, could we add accounts that belong to Google Hosted domains to a family created via gmail? Or is the definition of family purely gmail users?

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I shouldn't even be surprised anymore when this happens, yet I still am. Why is what is fundamentally a different billing method restricted by account type? It feels completely arbitrary.

There's a discussion on this going on over at Google's product forums [1]. Tons of people are in the same boat. These are some of the most devoted users of Google's products, yet are continually left frustrated and left out of new products for seemingly no apparent reason.

And no - migrating to a regular @gmail.com address isn't really feasible. I'd have to manually export all of my playlists, library, favorites from Play Music and countless other products.

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/play/86WVa8b_3i...

Project Fi is another service I'd love to sign up for, but my Google Voice number I've been using for years is associated with my Apps account, and I'm not about to start another number and start switching between Google accounts all the time just to use it.

I don't think it's arbitrary; Google Apps is an enterprisey product, where stability is prioritized over new features. Regular people who want to use their own domains are an exception, and certainly not the market they are going after.

I say this as someone who has used Apps in the past, but I've given up on it since.

I fail to see how enabling a different billing plan for a music streaming service they already offer to Apps customers has anything to do with "stability" of the core products that enterprise users rely on.

The codebase of the billing system might very well be separate and require updating.

Generally speaking, when you start your statement with the admission that you're ignorant of the thing you are about to slam, it's a signal that you may not be making a great case.

I have a difficult time believing that stability is the main reason for the lack of integration. Admins have the ability enable/disable certain features. Throw a beta flag in front of the feature and say it's not supported.

A couple of years ago, I created a plain old GMail account and transferred all of my mail to it, mainly so I could get all of the Google Now features that Apps accounts didn't have yet. I still send as my own email address, but I never log into Google Apps account because Google Apps accounts are terrible.

I highly recommend abandoning your account. Use a real GMail account. There's a one time switching cost, and it's worth it.

The switching cost is considerable and not realistically achievable for anyone that has embraced the Google world beyond email.

I would have to migrate:

* Android app purchases.

* Android apps that use the Google account for identity.

* Data in Google Fit

* Data in Google Maps including reviews and ratings of restaurants and places visited (which I find useful when I re-visit a city)

* Data in Google Calendars

* Address that others use for Calendar invites

* Address that others use for Google Drive shared folders

* Google Drive data, including configuration of permissions on folder access

* Google Photos, including configuration of permissions. These are photos going back to 1996, 100k+ photos.

* Browser sync

* Browser stored data, passwords and autofill

* Android backup

* Google Keep

* Group memberships

* Group ownerships, and somehow move those groups

* YouTube videos uploaded, and preferences

* Android TV apps and configuration

All of that, is just what I have on my Google Account that is on a Google Hosted domain.

And even if it were possible to somehow migrate that... I would most definitely lose all of the history that so much of that represents. i.e. Google Fit history, Maps Timeline history and so on.

Others may have it worse than I, I haven't got anything in Google+.

All of this works, and it works really well. It's a great offering, and I'm a much happier consumer paying for this than not.

But... it's silo'd. Even intra-family every one of us has our own account.

We were really hoping that Google Hosted gave us a path to treat our family as an organisation and to share within... but that's not how it's panned out.

So we've been hoping that Play Music for Families represents the ability to create a shared group for the family, just a group with a couple of accounts, and these can share stuff. Starting with Music, but hopefully eventually reaching Photos, TV, Video, etc.

Instead it does look like the definition of "Family" is "Gmail accounts", not "a small group of immediately related individuals"... and in that latter definition, who cares whether an individual has a Google Hosted account?

Fantastic comment. Thankfully I don't have an Apps account so this isn't really a concern for me, but it's almost scary to see the list you provided, it made me realize just how truly entrenched I am to Google's ecosystem. I use almost every feature you listed. At a certain point moving away from Google's ecosystem just because unfeasible because you come to rely so heavily on certain products in your day-to-day life.

It was only after I wrote it that it dawned on me that I use my Google Account for authentication with a number of third parties.

About 90% of things I use email + password (and 2FA where available), but that last 10% is a mix of Google authenticated, or Twitter authenticated.

Because Google Accounts are an identity provider, even if I wanted to move I really have no way to do that now.

Google is quite bad at those things. Want another example: Setup the Google Merchant center with your account and you can't change the country of your account anymore. Moving country and you want to change the country so that you can, e.g., install Android apps that are only available in particular countries? In that case you have to create a new Gmail account. (More information: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/21/psa-you-cant-change-...). Also, it seems that the same issue might apply to Project Fi accounts (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectFi/comments/3utpe0/you_cant_...).

> * Google Drive data, including configuration of permissions on folder access

It's worse than that: I think it's actually impossible to move ownership of Google docs/sheets/slides/etc from a hosted account to a gmail account and vice versa. Also impossible to transfer ownership between two hosted accounts. You can only transfer ownership between accounts in the same domain.

Ran into this problem in a big way when my company's domain name changed and we were trying to migrate.

All the solutions I found involved giving all your data to a third party. Or some complicated export/import conversion through MS-formatted equivalents.

So even after a year on the new domain now, every so often I need to log back in to the old account just to get something from Drive.

It's gotten so that any time I see something new from Google, the first thing I do is check if I can even use it. Often I am disappointed. I still can't use Fi, and Google Now is almost useless because it refuses to use my email to customize itself.

Google Now is so crippled for me that yesterday I considered downloading Cortona.

It is possible to get full Google Now functionality in a Google Apps domain.

Go to the Google Apps Admin Console (https://admin.google.com/AdminHome).

Navigate to Apps > Additional Google Services

You'll see a gray bar at the top of the screen ("Filter: Top featured services"). Click the "X" on the top right to disable that filter.

Scroll down to "Web History" and select "On for everyone."

Each user may then need to also enable Web History for his or her own account (https://www.google.com/settings/accounthistory/search).

No, it shouldn't be that hard, but, yes, that will work.

Doesn't use of the Google Apps stuff mean your content is not scanned for ads? Certainly you don't get ads when you're using the mail.

Google is an advertising company. This Apps thing is a side business. They're going to focus on bringing features to the users they are selling ads against. Users who aren't generating ads are going to be an afterthought.

You can argue that they should pay you more attention if you are paying for the Google services but as a practical matter this company is focused on ads, not on satisfying paying customers.

The paid plan of Play Music is an ad-free product.

Play Music for Families is paid for, and advert free.

Your argument does not apply to this product.

Why can't you just create another email for these services? The actual email address is irrelevant for something like Google Play Music.

You end up with a fragmented and awkward experience.

Not only are you likely to pay double for some things, there just awkwardness...

I.e. if you use Google Play Music in chrome on a desktop, it defaults to the first account you signed in with... Likely the hosted one. So then you have to change it, which means a ui dance and multiple sign-ins before you can press play on what you last listened to.

If you sign in first with gmail, then other services default to the first account and you get the dance accessing other stuff.

Not to mention multiple invoices, your card in a few places.

Or that my android TV uses my hosted account and has subscriptions, TV and film rights... And I'd lose that stuff, or if I keep using the hosted on that I'd not have integrated access to play as that would be on a different account.

My photos are on my hosted account too... We have a family tablet device, what account should be used for that? I'm using sync permissions currently to restrict it to media and not email.

Basically, by not supporting products on Google Hosted domains, lots of very shitty user experiences emerge.

For those on Google Hosted, the best experience open to us is to stay fully in one world.

Doesn't work the other way around either. I originally signed up under an old @gmail.com address since that was the first address I used in Android and it held all my purchases. My family shares the account on all our devices. All of our personal email is under a family Google Apps account. I signed up for family and when I try to accept it tells me it's not allowed for Google Apps accounts. Joy.

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