The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works.
But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did".
Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling?
I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.
The frequency with which new features point blank did not work at all just blew me away. The problem 100% of the time was that some dev had written a feature given a bug ticket, written some unit tests that covered the code, but never actually brought the serving stack up and played with it themselves. They thought QA meant some test with lots of mocks, not, ya know, actually testing the feature as a user would see it. It was painful to run the servers locally so they just didn't bother a lot of the time.
Can’t separate that from the product - as a user I care about the whole thing
Funny. I don't disagree, but I find Youtube's search much better than Google Search itself lately.
Apart from the "barely related" videos interspersed with real results, it actually shows results related to the keywords I typed.
Some are outstanding.
Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.
That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.
lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ.
In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses.
Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.
They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video.
Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?
The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?
This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.
My kids only get to use curated experiences where a human has actually picked the content (ie. pretty much every other Kids video app).
No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.