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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

This is, by far, the most important point. Google could make it very easy for you to use their apps offline, but they don't. The recent searches in Google Maps not being saved offline is especially annoying to me personally, and Google seems to think that it's impossible to store data if you don't send them to Google.

I can see them saying "we didn't want to confuse customers who thought syncing was broken when they didn't see their searches in other phones", but given how easy it is to tell the user "you have disabled sync", I don't think there's any excuse for Google to behave like this.

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To me, the tipping point was years ago when they changed the logout screen. Now instead of logging out with one click, you "log out" but the next time you come back to Google your profile is automatically selected, waiting for your password. You have to click "sign in with a different account", then click on the X to actually remove your profile from being tied to your browser.

Anyway, it was so satisfying to log in and see absolutely nothing, no activities whatsoever.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8638157

To me it seems most likely they have a syncing framework/library that takes care of both the local storage of recent items, forwarding those to the google cloud services, and retrieving them when necessary. And when you disable the cloud services, this framework becomes inactive.

Of course, you could say the design of the framework is hostile, or that they should fall back to something else, but I can see this being considered extra unnecessary work.

To me it seems obvious that adding these sync features was the original "extra unnecessary work". It is a dark pattern that Google is obviously engaging in to the detriment of their users. They went the extra mile to annoy their users to gather some more data.

Personally I think the syncing between devices is very convenient.

Yes, which is great. But note that they require Location history for it! So to get saved (and synced) previous searches you need to let your phone upload your location constantly to Google.

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