Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

Two years ago I used just about everything Google and had done so since Gmail first came out. My Android phone was googlefi. Internet was google. Gmail. DNS. SSO to pretty much everything.

One day out of the blue my Google Pay account was marked as fraud and locked down. I couldn't update/add/change any of my payment information. I have no idea why. I don't remember when/how I even found out it was locked down, I wasn't really sure at that point what stopped working, if anything. I didn't have anything TELL me that it wasn't working so I thought this was just an isolated event that would get resolved quickly and wasn't affecting anything important.

Then throughout that week I started to notice what wasn't working. I could log into gmail (IIRC) but I wasn't getting any email. My custom domains that forwarded to gmail stopped resolving. My cell phone wouldn't make calls anymore. I never had a problem with SSO logins, thankfully.

The credit card I was using for all of my Google services was coming up on its expiration and I desperately needed my 15+ year old gmail to work. I'm pretty sure I was in the middle of selling a house when this was going on. I have so much mail in the inbox that it won't accept mail without paying for the service. Google has this form you fill out and attach a picture of your drivers license to so that they can investigate the "fraud." Over that month I sent in my DL at least 3 times. I never received any response.

I was without a phone for a week because they had no customer service to even speak to, not that I could even make any outbound calls. I wound up getting another phone plan elsewhere because that was the most critical thing to me. I was so pissed at Google I switched to an iPhone.

I was getting no response from Google and days/weeks were going by so finally I bit the bullet and de-googled everything I could. I migrated all of my 15 years of email to Fastmail. I moved all of my DNS records. Changed my ISP. It was infuriating.

It's been about 2 years since I did that, I've still never heard from Google about anything. But now all of my accounts are unlocked.

I will never, ever trust my important accounts to Google again.

You don't have to switch to Apple though. It's a bit like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Apple has an even stronger hold on your digital life if you decide to fully invest into its ecosystem. It's much better to stay on Android, but de-google it, and avoiding the use of your Google account

Moving to Apple isn't necessary but it isn't a trap either for OP. A main lesson they learned was "digital diversity". If they get locked out of their phone now it would be an inconvenience instead of a life altering event.

The swap to iPhone is just another "fuck you" to Google, which they earned there.

I swapped to an iPhone last year. After using Android exclusively.

I’ve been extremely happy with my iPhone. Apple has all of the little polish and cross connections that make it a wonderful experience. I think Android made sense while the smartphone market was growing, but all of the platforms are mature now. Android fragments further and Apple polishes more.

Yeah I've been very happy. Carplay is light years better than Android Auto. That was one of the biggest worries I had as I used AA a LOT.

The incentives are more aligned with apple so this is less of a problem, they also have a lot more support and help available when there are problems.

Sure, but if Apple decides to lock your account (a much more rare phenomenon if sampling Hacker News comments) you can have someone on the phone with you in minutes, or even walk to a store where they will help you.

Apple isn't perfect, but they're generally pretty reasonable and will work to help you, even if it takes multiple tries. My experience with Google has been the exact opposite. Everything they touch results in Kafka-esque psychological torture.

Almost like paying the "apple tax" for the hardware means that you're the customer, instead of just being entirely the product like you are with Google.

When I look at reviews for businesses, I don't look at the 5 star reviews. I look at the 1-2 star reviews, and I look exclusively for reviews that describe _how the business responded to the problem_.

I was looking for somewhere to leave my dog for a few weeks while I was out of country. There's a lower rated place where the negative reviews that match this are things like "One of the other dogs scratched my dog! They got her to the vet and paid the bills, but they shouldn't have let that happen!". There's another with a better overall rating where the reviews are "This staff at this place are phenomenal and really love the pets but the owner is an absolute ass. If anything happens, don't even bother asking for a refund or trying to complain."

I sent my dog to the first place.

Accidents, mistakes, and general "life doesn't go according to plan" things _will_ happen. I'm less interested in the best case scenario, and more interested in how they handle this stuff. That tells me what the worst case scenario looks like. If my worst case hotel scenario is "mildly inconvenienced", that's a damn sight better than "left out on the street at 1AM with nowhere to go".

So on that note... yeah, that's pretty much why I have an iPhone.

At some point it suddenly stopped accepting one of my credit cards and refused to let me re-add it. Apple literally has a `/contact/` page on their site where the 800 number is easily discoverable. I called and was connected almost immediately. They asked if I could use another card and I told them I could, but only if I _had_ to, I prefer to use this one for all my recurring charges. "No problem." They spent about 40 minutes on the phone with me (including calling me back immediately when my signal dropped and we got disconnected) and resolved the problem. This is support in relation to a ~$800 one time device purchase and a $0.99/mo subscription.

When I was paying Google over a million dollars a year I couldn't get answers out of them or get my issue resolved.

Even ignoring all the other anecdotes I see online... no way in hell I'm trusting Google with anything I care about.

> When I look at reviews for businesses, I don't look at the 5 star reviews. I look at the 1-2 star reviews, and I look exclusively for reviews that describe _how the business responded to the problem_.

This is why it is so valuable to post negative reviews on your competitors. People actually believe this s...[0]

> They got her to the vet and paid the bills

Doesn't sound fake, it doesn't even need to be. You post a few more reviews 1) They paid my vet bill too! 2) Mine is scared of everything after going there. 3) etc

With google it is different tho, their bad reviews aren't anecdotal. It's stunning that law makes haven't touched the subject.

For extra irony, google is running what seems to me the biggest business review scheme in the world. It isn't even legal[1] but if they had any sense or decency they would build their own customer verification system without law makers demanding they do so.

Everyone suffering their fake reviews would love to provide their customers with a link and a review token. Then, even if you've screwed up horrendously you can express how you regret things went that way and apologize. Responding like that to fake reviews is out of the question. Your best case scenario is if you can pay the fake reviewer to stop.

You can buy google ads tho.

[0] - https://www.wdbj7.com/2022/10/17/five-star-fakes-small-busin...

[1] - https://www.softwarefair.de/en/2022/06/02/google-fails-to-im...

What constitutes a real review though? There's a small restaurant I used to go to. The last two times I left after 5-10 minutes of all waiters doing the "if i don't look over there i don't have to work" trick. Each time I went on to Google to write a review. Is this not a legitimate review?

It might be true but if there is no evidence it ever happened it never happened.

What value would you get from reading such a review?

This is way too complicated. Even reviews by people who made a real purchase are suspect. Amazon is full of such reviews where customers are offered a discount or a gift if they submit a positive review.

I guess in a scenario similar to mine, you'd look for patterns. The same guy saying the same specific thing makes me think of a grudge too. However if it is multiple sources complaining about similar things, then it's a pattern. You'd also get to decide whether what matters to them matters to you. I think a sister comment was saying something similar. For example, it is routine where I live for people to complain about pizza joints that "do not even send ketchup" with delivery orders. This I am not too hung up on. :)

the most trustworthy of evidence

To me, this is the critical difference. Google is so large that if you end up in some tiny edge case, that "tiny" still includes tens of thousands of people yet Google is so large and impermeable that there exists no person that you can call. The only success stories involve people who personally know Google employees or who have social media accounts that get so much attention that it brings embarrassment to corporate Google. Google is too big to be allowed to exist.

GP mentions nothing of Apple. Did you mean to reply to a sibling?

Lesson here is to not put all your eggs in one basket. I try to make sure there is no one vendor service that can become mission critical in my life, specially not likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple.

Also, ensure your suppliers have a helpdesk where you can place a ticket that a real person who is paid by them will have to look at. Lesson learned on a bookkeeping service recently - I went for lowest price, and they had NO customer support, it was all crowd sourced :(

Phone number, email, and banking should be separate. These are basically the pillars of your digital life. Then for the rest of Google services, you can just download a monthly data dump on Google Takeout which you can restore to any other service at your own leisure.

>But now all of my accounts are unlocked.

But your accounts are unlocked isn't it?

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