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Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

It does do what it says on the box. You're not required to download any of the apps in order to use Google Drive. My contention is that the OP claims that they deserve some kind of reimbursement because "they're paying for it" but the "it" here is not the app, it's the service. They're paying for online storage. There are several ways to sync your files to that service. The Google Drive app is a free option. He's paying for the service, not the app.

Note that even you said "service" in your description of what it is.

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The syncing apps are absolutely part of the package.

They're a part of the package but they are not what the user is paying for. If free users and paid users both have access to the app, then it's not a paid feature. People aren't paying for the app, they're paying for the service and, at least in this case, the service is still working.

If the OP was actually concerned with finding a solution to their problem (which is absolutely an edge case) and not just being a squeaky wheel, they'd pay $30 for InSync or find another free tool that syncs with Google Drive. The Google app is a bonus provided by Google to make the use of their service easier. The OP complaining about being a paying customer is pointless because what they're paying for is still completely useable.

No. It's literally "Store, sync, and share files easily." [1]

There is no way to sync a device without an app. The app is not a bonus, it is a core feature of the service.

[1] https://gsuite.google.com/products/drive/

And it does exactly that for 99.9% of users. The app is not what the user is paying for, though, and he doesn’t deserve a refund just because it doesn’t work for his particular situation.

If free users and paid users both have access to the app, then it's not a paid feature.

You just assert this as if it was self-evident, but it's not. The same feature can be offered for free and as a paid component of a package, just like the same code can be licensed to some under the GPL and to others under a proprietary license.

In this case, syncing is part of the service being purchased, and the means to achieve that is absolutely part of the package, even if it's also offered for free to others.

Drive is terrible then if what it says on tje box can’t deliver working sync clients. Dropbox delivers working sync clients out of the box, even though you could just use their web interface.

First off, I'm not sure why everyone is using the phrase "what is says on the box". There is no box for this service. Services don't come in boxes and the website doesn't say anything about paying for an app. You're paying for the service and the service continues to work. If you don't like the app and that makes using the service so much of a challenge, use another app with Google Drive or switch to Dropbox. The OP clearly has to use Google Drive because Google is the only service that offers unlimited storage space and they just want to be the squeaky wheel by falsely equating the app with the service that they're actually paying for.

You're making an extremely nitpicky and useless distinction. If a service provider offers native clients for a set of supported platforms, for use with their storage service, a natural and reasonable expectation is that they will work.

If a video game publisher sells a game for Mac and Windows, and one of those platforms doesn't work, then the affected customer is entitled either to customer support or a refund. The advertised product (native client on a certain platform) isn't working as advertised.

Of course they should work. You're making a false equivalence, though. A video game is a product that you've paid for. The user in this case is not paying for the app, they're paying for the service. Just because Google offers the app to use with their storage service doesn't mean that their support should refund money to the user when the service itself is functioning exactly as advertised and intended. My contention is 100% with the OP's insistence that they deserve a refund because they're "paying for it". They're not paying for the app and the service is working so why is a refund in order?

The customer made a decision to use a particular storage platform due to the features that are advertised. One of those features is a desktop client.

If the desktop client is failing, then he's not getting what is promised "on the box" (or in the feature set advertised on google.com).

They sell that client pretty hard btw: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2490101?hl=en

To use the full power of Google Drive, you should install Google Drive for Mac/PC, a desktop sync client. This synchronizes any or all your files to Google Drive on the web, making them available anywhere, at any time, on any device. It also provides secure, cloud-based storage for your files.

That's a mis-framing of the situation.

The issue isn't so much as the client is failing - but that it wasn't designed to handle their edge-case - and trying to sync 700,000+ items, or 700GB worth of files to your desktop is definitely at the edges.

Other desktop sync clients (e.g. Box.net or Dropbox) exhibit similar performance characteristics - e.g. Dropbox advertise a limit of around 300,000 files (https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit). So this isn't something specific to us.

For us, I know there isn't a hard limit per se, but there are memory limitations, due to this being a 32-bit binary. So things like the user's environment, and the length of certain fields could also play a factor.

However, it is something that I know several smart people are chipping away at steadily - in fact, there's a new "Backup and Sync client" we announced a month or so ago, which is launching any day now. It's basically Drive Sync Client 2.0.

seems like if there's a limit to the number of files the client can handle, the client should warn you as you're approaching that limit, and ideally block you from adding too many.

If the client allows you do do something, and you do it, and it causes the client to break, that is 100% a "failure"

Save for the fact the Dropbox client wouldn't work for this user, as it maxes out at ~300k files while this user has more than double that. This user would have similar issues with the Dropbox sync client as they're having with the Drive client.

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