As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. It’s a major turn off.
Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service.
Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played.
So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
> Play videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. Background play is available on YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids mobile apps (if these apps are available in your location).
They only allowed background play on Youtube with a subscription.
Friend of mine who isn't me still downloads MP3s on torrents and has no cloud subscriptions. I'm sure he's smug about this.
I definitely had friends that used Youtube as a poor-mans spotify and would just keep the videos playing in the background on their desktop.
> I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
If it's the way they did, it was one of the worst ways anyone could think of. It baffled me how so many smart minds can work at Google and take so many terrible decisions at the same time.
This was just one in several equally stupid decisions they did. They could have dominated the messaging market by now, but they threw out that chance several times.
Sometimes I think it might have been on purpose. Maybe they are afraid to dominate too many markets at the same time and avoid a anti trust lawsuit? Because otherwise it literally makes no sense. Either this or they need to feed their stupid hierarchical loop giving senseless promotions to whoever creates a new thing that nobody asked for by destroying another thing that people were starting to use and like.
Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
I like Hydrogen Audio for theory and comparisons: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Li...
The entire point of a music player is to play music in the background.
It doesn't. It forces you to watch videos (if you're steaming to your home stereo or other casting enabled device) and prioritizes the video versions of everything, even if the video isn't officially from the artist and us just some random person's resubmission.
The user experience is almost impossibly terrible. It seems like the kind of curated experience one would concoct if they were trying to prank someone with an intentionally frustratingly hostile UX.
Oh, please, I worked at Google as well, and this is typical Google’s inability to have attention span and coherent leadership for anything longer than 6 months. One VP did one thing, then another one another, then it turned out that it’s stupid and inconsistent. As. with. any. other. non-core product! Basically Google’s top leadership doesn’t care enough to impose coherent strategy across different divisions, and thing like this happen all the time (Android/Chrome OS, Chat/GVC/Hangouts/Allo/Duo/RCS/Meet, Gmail/Inbox, Nest/Google Home, and so on).
I'm sorry, what? Are you saying that Google play music would only play music if in the foreground? That's flat out wrong.
What are you talking about? You could always do this with GPM.
It was YTM which added the requirement for a paid account to keep allowing this very same thing.
You have things completely backwards.
Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it.
iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210200
But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
Feels like Google has renamed a few things to be too close to Apple's.
Google Wallet became Google Pay. Picasa became Google Photos. also they have Google Drive. Google Messages...
Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.
In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.
If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.
When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.
That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else.
I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.
Only recently. Before iMessage, Apple had iChat. iMessage used to interoperate, but no longer does.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
0 https://support.apple.com/guide/facetime/welcome/mac
1 no evidence cited
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.
Apple Music’s streaming service is a separate offering that has grown larger than iTunes.
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.