Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices | Hacker News Reader

Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices

arstechnica.com

132 pointsBerislavLopac99 comments

The story summarised: they entered the market rapidly as a me too proposition after seeing apple’s HealthKit, did a crap job of it, decided to start again and pissed off everyone in the process.

Whereas Apple have managed to produce devices, a whole portfolio of tools and integrations and even down to training videos and fitness programmes…

I think Google is ideologically incapable of anything new. This is proved by countless “killed by Google” incidents.

Create value for shareholders vs. create value for customers

I wonder if the amazing idea thatcreating value for the customer creates value for the shareholders will ever catch on? I call it trickle up economics.

There is a line of thought that the more value you give a customer the less your company will keep for itself and the less a shareholder will make. A volunteer gives away all their value to the recipient. An entrepreneur wants to collect money in exchange for value created. Far more money than they spent creating the value for the customer.

man, this made me a little sad to read and think about. and not because of your comment specifically: i know that this must be, generally, how one has to think and talk about economics any sort of academic or abstract sense, but... i guess i just haven't really done that very much

It makes me sad too because as a worldview it leads to so many awful things.

It's actually a Tragedy of the Commons situation. If very few people think that way, everyone is better off and the society is a better place. But in such a place, the people that have this mindset will absolutely be more successful then if they didn't have it.

At this point we're decades into this flavor of capitalism and the profiteering has long since become the norm, sadly.

And before someone says "it's always been like that"... No, it hasn't. Even in pop culture from a few decades ago you've got the characters taking great pride in providing good products for great prices. Nowadays our culture mostly makes fun of people like that and they're portrayed as targets to be exploited...

I have always found it amusing how much of our modern economic system looks something like this.

- What if everyone shared and cooperated and got along?

- Well then someone that wanted to take advantage of people would come along and make a big mess of it!

- Well what's your proposal then, should we stop those people, outlaw their greed and avarice?

- Hmm... no I think we should reward it and build our entire system around getting greed to produce useful outcomes.

- Ok, so we've been doing that for a while and the people that would have taken advantage of the commons have privatized the commons, taken full advantage of that, purchased the government, and essentially rule over us while we all fight for crumbs...

- But you've got an iPhone, so it's basically working great

Another thing to think about that is also sad and just sorta becomes part of the background noise of existing in society is exploitation. If you ignore the emotionally charged connotations around the term and focus on its meaning

> make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).

Capital is in the business of exploiting Labor. It is the only thing that makes sense in our economic system. For anyone doing labor for $X for a company that then sells it to a customer for $Y it must hold that X < Y or else the company will fail. The arrangement most people operate under, myself included, is one where you are willingly underselling yourself. The trade off that most people point to is that the people are willing to do this because the stability of getting $X all the time regardless of this weeks / months / years sales is worth foregoing $Y, essentially you are buying stability with the difference. Although the recent rash of layoffs for companies, regardless of how well they are doing, does offer a counterpoint to that theory.

Not that simple. Apple seems to be creating value for shareholders & customers.

That's the great part: creating value for customers can pay out for shareholders as well in the long run. But it's probably not a viable option if you want quick returns.

This is the third case: creating value for employees. Google promotes people for making new things. Thereby guaranteeing product churn.

(edit: the limit case is of course Elon Musk arguing that he should simply be given the entire company treasury as payroll at Tesla, one single employee taking all the value produced)

Glad we could make this about Elon, haven’t heard enough about him in the last 30 seconds

How is this creating value for shareholders? They wasted a bunch of engineer and pm salaries building useless products that never made (and now never will make) any significant money.

But that's not how shareholder value is created. Shareholder value is created by press releases and hype, encouraging new people to buy the stock and drive up the price, not by building anything useful to society or long-term profitable.

So if Google Fit drove a hype cycle, it was successful.

Yes, and that is why stock in pets.com is so valuable and why Segway, Inc, sold for so much money when it sold.

> This is proved by countless “killed by Google” incidents.

Oh, The Graveyard! (By Google): https://killedbygoogle.com/

They just don't do UX or product strategy or UAT or any of the things that aren't technical. They always have cool designs and sophisticated features but they just don't match how people live.

If I'm not mistaken, this might be just about the best Killed By Google ever?

Google Fit is a health data service offered by Google, with all of the health data stored under your Google account on Google's servers. Its API is also the defacto means of interchange on the Android platform, so if you want the measurements of your smart scales on App A to sync over to your calorie counting App B (assuming the two services don't have their own direct integration), you would hand over your measurements to Google's Fit service and then have the other app read it from Google.

If I understand this correctly, Health Connect is a device-local API. App A saves the measurement to this local data store on your phone, and App B reads from that, without your measurements ever hitting Google's servers?

That seems much better.

What if you change or lose your phone?

Daily encrypted backup to Google Drive, like WhatsApp?

Local-first with cloud backup.

Customer wins because everything can be local and you can extract it all, google/apple also wins because they get convenience style lock-in effects while being able to say that it's not lock-in.

I wish there was a simple and cheap off the shelf home server that could do this for laypeople, and backup photos etc. without relying on Google or Apple, but it doesn't really exist. Synology and QNAP and such get close, but they're still pricey and their backup options are limited. I've had Synology, and the big problem there was that each upgrade erased my photo database and albums and invalidated all of the links I sent out. It's pointless to rely on these.

Perhaps in major upgrades. Even there, scan the database again. Not sure how tags are handled.

For personal use, the links are usually needed for a week or two.

I have a large photo library. I had facial recognition setup on the photos as well, and categorized albums and such. I went through two DSM upgrades, and each of them erased all of this, and each subsequent version of the photo software became worse and had fewer features. No more.

it's the same as healthkit basically. The fact that the 2 APIs are converging is good news for us programmers.

Disclaimer: I am the author of this https://github.com/dariosalvi78/cordova-plugin-health

Seems like they're moving everyone to health connect? it is automatically installed on my Pixel. The UI is very different, doesn't even have a dashboard, I can't see my sleep and any of my data as well only what I shared to other app. Also weirdly when I go to play store, it says installed, but I can't search it on the list of app?

What's with the decision to move to another app anyway? The only thing that they should do is literally nothing.

>What's with the decision to move to another app anyway?

Someone gets promoted for launching and making "impact".

>The only thing that they should do is literally nothing.

That's not "making impact". You can't get promoted for that. In fact, that's how you become a Xoogler.

Health Connect is to Google Fit like HealthKit is to Health app. Health Connect is just the database basically. Fit is one of the many apps that will use Health Connect.

It could be to avoid regulatory pressure. The tide is changing and this could be a preventive move.

If you just provide a database, you don't compete with Health apps.

Google just doesn't have the attention span required for this sort of thing. I was around at Google when Larry Page was pushing the "more wood, fewer arrows" mantra but it never translated to organizational or cultural change.

Some things work very well when they're bottom-up or engineering focused (eg search, GMail). Others require top-down leadership to create a coherent product and user experience (eg an operating system). So Google has built some amazing technology but hasn't been great at things that require polish. Apple OTOH has been very good at producing a consistent user experience.

Apple can push through things in a way Google can't because Google engineers are incentivized to write something new or rewrite something for "impact" to get promoted and then you move on to the next hot thing. Apple Pay is a great example of what Apple is good at. They just keep plugging away. Every week there's another bank in some minor country that signs on and over the years they've built an ecosystem. Google doesn't have that kind of patience.

Likewise with the Apple Watch. It was originally launched as a "luxury" product, mainly due to a bad executive hire (IMHO) ie Angela Ahrendts. It's found a niche (but still not mass market appeal) as a health and fitness device.

APIs are forever. You have to be extremely careful about what you release into the wild. Once something hits production, you've made a commitment. There are only so many times you can burn your platform users.

Another example I came across recently was with Nest. There's another Google product (because of course there is) called Google Matter for integration into, say, Amazon or Apple's smart device ecosystems. But guess what? The Nest Learning Themostat isn't compatible and won't be migrated. Because reasons. And this was a device that they were selling last year. That's just unacceptable.

Remember the debacle with Linux support for Google Drive?

Anyway, fitness devices are still a relatively small market and Apple have consumed a lot of the oxygen. This market just isn't big enough for Google to really care about. Google Fit was probably someone's E6->E7 project and they're long gone now.

    Likewise with the Apple Watch. It was originally 
    launched as a "luxury" product,

There was a luxury gold version. The rest were priced at mainstream smartwatch prices.

    It's found a niche (but still not mass market appeal) 
    as a health and fitness device.

Niche? Where do you reside? Greater than 50% market share and > 50 million units sold per year. Anecdotally, they're common to see here in the suburbs of a major American city.

(FWIW, I personally am not a fan of smartwatches and don't own one, so it's not like I'm exactly defending them. Just genuinely puzzled by your take...)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1421546/apple-watch-sale...

Ouch. Is this going to give our developers another unnecessary workload as we have to update our apps and integrations? Is there at least somewhere I can read about the benefits of switching to Health Connect?

Yes.

Especially since health connect will require you to update your minimum targets!

User privacy. Keeps the data on the phone.

Speed. Fit warehoused and brokered data centrally via OAuth which is far slower a local-local system API integration.

https://developer.android.com/health-and-fitness/guides/heal...

I think this is a much better design for this perimedical data, but it's absolutely going to be harder to do some things now you have to interact directly with a device API.

For this reason, I have no interest in investing my data and time in Google's consumer products.

Will the replacement API work with all google account types? I have had to switch from fitbit to garmin, because new fitbit devices require a google account, but apparently my google account isn’t good enough (I signed up to their business suite thing because I wanted to use gmail with my own domain name, only for business accounts to be deprecated with no migration path...)

Discussion from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262082

At what point will the dev community stop seeing any Google product as fit for purpose? I've personally been bitten with their services getting killed, seemingly at random.

>At what point will the dev community stop seeing any Google product as fit for purpose?

But that one was really called Fit!

Surely it would be fit for that purpose!

Oh well. It's the deprecation of the fittest at the Google Graveyard.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I doubt they will, as long as we have a culture of disposable products everywhere. Google is the one-time use plastic bag of the software world.

I'd love to see the conclusions that lead to these shutdowns.

Per the article, they have 3 different Fitness/Health APIs. Having no cohesive corporate strategy around initiatives like this, and instead letting individual departments chart their course, leading to confusion, duplicated work, and diffusion of focus, is very typical of Google.

They help with someone's KPIs, OKRs or some other unhelpful BS.

Google Fit APIs were a security hell. Being cloud based, they required a pretty horrible approval process I recommend nobody to go through. The new model is more similar to Apple's: all is local, user is responsible for accepting/rejecting data sharing.

Google doing Google things

I'm gonna start the degoogling of my life asap.

Switched to proton, never looked back

Fastmail for me, but yeah same. I did that a long time ago -- the only thing I use still is search and youtube. The latter of which has no real replacement sadly

Kagi is a great replacement for search. Agree about Youtube having no replacement for now.

I also use Kagi and I really enjoy it (enough to pay for the ultimate subscription), but it's hard for me to recommend to someone wanting to "degoogle" their life. Kagi search results depend (probably a lot) on the Google search API. If Google rug pulled that, Kagi search results would definitely be effected.

99% of my searches are on DDG and it's my default browser (on iOS), I'm pretty happy with it.

What do you do for calendar? Docs? Files? Maps? Photos?

I would say Photos is the only difficult ones.

Docs can be handled locally or via any other online office suite. Files can be stored anywhere, from local NAS to other remote storage services, Calendar is easily exported and imported somwhere else or locally. And maps can be used without account so you don't really need to export anything.

Apples apps for all of those; work is Google Docs because I don't get a choice

Not the parent, but also degoogled as much as pragmatic lately.

For files and photos, I use an NAS in my home (Synology). Works pretty smooth with automated photo backup etc. For office stuff I just use Libre Office, I don't need collaboration features. Not interested in cloud options personally, so sorry if that's not helpful. I'd probably go for Dropbox for most of this if I was.

Google Maps is, for me, unfortunately one of the services I wasn't able to replace yet. I tried to use OSM (also for navigating), which actually worked great for me. But I use satellite view so often (mostly for entertainment) that I couldn't quite break the Maps habit.

I don't use Proton but don't they offer a calendar and file storage? I know a lot of email providers do (I use mailbox.org and they do). Personally I host Nextcloud on a VPS and use that for file storage, calendar and photos.

Maps is a tough one. It's probably the main Google service I still use (YouTube being another one). There is OSM of course but it can't compete with Google on features.

Fastmail's hosted calendar is good, and the file storage allows for file storage. Happy customer here.

Indeed, we do offer both: https://proton.me/calendar and https://proton.me/drive.

I'm also a happy proton user for my one-person business. I want to switch with the personal stuff as well but I just find the family plan so expensive [0] compared to alternatives. I also don't like that you get 6 users, you almost always have too many or you have too little (what family is exactly 6 anyway?). Why so rigid?

My kids are young, they just need an inbox, nothing more.

Ah well, I guess sooner of later I will switch, it's just such a nice product + I share the 3 TB with less than 6 so I do benefit, it would be more than enough for all our pics/videos to date... But then how to rsync from our Linux server ;) (I bet it's coming and I am slowly getting fed up with playing NextCloud sys-admin for the family, it was a hobby but starting to feel as a chore as of late...)

Also, I guess switching from mail plus to family will allow me to have my business email within the family (as custom mailbox with it's own domain).

I would have switched years ago if it was like 10/month for the family (or like 2 per actual family member + some base fee). But I guess the storage and VPN are nice. (But hey that tailscale + Mullvad is so elegant...)

Choices choices...

[0] https://proton.me/family

I have my own domain so this took a couple of hours. One of the interesting things I noticed was how much e-mail Gmail had been filtering poorly – I’d never see things like newsletters even though they leaked a lot of spam – so email immediately became more useful.

There were no downsides. Not a single one. I think that should scare Google’s management more than anything else: they fiddled while their competitors didn’t fall asleep and there’s no moat.

Who are you using now for mail service? I did the same and moved to Proton Mail. So far the experience has been great with the (rather large) exception that due to the security architecture email search is subpar if you don’t use an external email client on desktop with their IMAP bridge. Ultimately I’m willing to accept that compromise, but I’m open to other options as the encryption features (that interfiere with some UX like search) aren’t the main reason I use the service anyway. I just didn’t want to have all my eggs in the Google basket anymore and the privacy aspect was a nice bonus.

I switched to Fastmail. Search performance didn’t seem to notably change.

Thanks I'll give it a try! That's the beauty of using your own domain, you can just switch backend services without updating 100s of accounts.

Hi! Thank you for your feedback! We'd like to point out that, in addition to using Bridge to connect your Proton account with a third-party desktop email app, you can also perform content search in our web app: https://proton.me/support/search-message-content. We're planning to bring this functionality to the mobile apps in the future too.

I do use that feature, it barely improves search at all unfortunately.

I just did a quick test of a pretty standard use-case for me, which is to search for a package's tracking number in my email. I literally opened the email in the Proton Mail desktop client, copied the tracking number, pasted it into the search box, and...no emails found.

Pasted the same tracking number into Apple Mail (which uses Bridge) and it found the email immediately.

Yes I have "Search message content" turned on and yes it finished downloading all of the emails.

So either the search function itself is fundamentally broken, or it's not actually downloading all of the emails to search them even though it indicates that it does.

This is just one simple example, but in general regardless of whether I have "Search message content" enabled or not, I have to pretty much know the sender's email address to find anything reliably.

It's really a major usability issue, and the main reason I don't recommend Proton Mail to my friends and family.

Thanks for the clarification. We only need to check one more thing - have you activated content search on the Proton Mail desktop app too? Because if you activated it on the web app only, it doesn't apply to the desktop app, it needs to be activated on desktop separately. If you have done so, please report this to us at: https://proton.me/support/troubleshooting?product=mail so we can look into it. Thanks.

I wonder what's going to happen to Google Fiber and all the people dependent on that.

Maps is the only service that keeps me tied to Google. I am not good with directions so its a lot of help to me and I really havent found any reliable alternatives to it.

i've been super happy with organic maps, but i have to admit maybe 3 possible downsides: 1. in my country openstreetmap is very well populated so i usually find what i'm looking for, but this isn't the case everywhere 2. search is just not as good sometimes - i once typed "gym" and it took me to a place in india. so to find places i still rarely use google maps. 3. there's no proper desktop app yet, or at least it's not widely published - i think it's being worked on, but until it's in the arch repos (the one in the AUR says it's outdated) i'm holding off on it.

still, giving google 99% less data is worth the slight inconveniences sometimes for me. also, it works perfectly offline if you download the maps!

I would make a request to show fitness centres as a 'category'.

In the mobile/tablet OS area, the mainstream choices are either Google or Apple's walled garden.

I'm still tied to Google account on mobile devices unless I want to venture into the wilderness of custom roms and all the fun but exhausting challenges they bring in.

If anyone has managed to use a de-googled Android phone as a daily driver without sacrificing much functionality(like financial apps), I would like to know how long has it been and the challenges involved.

i've been using my Fairphone 5 without any google account since last december, so about 5 months now i guess?

Not fully de-googled yet, not even a custom rom - just the stock OS, but not signing into an account. Most importantly, this means no Play Store for me - i get the majority of my apps from Obtainium (directly download + install APK releases from the app developer's source repository) and f-droid.

The apps i use most by far are messaging apps like Signal and Telegram which offer direct downloads and easy updating without play store, Organic maps for navigation, breezy weather, Immich (google photos replacement, self hosted) and etar (calendar, but its kinda clunky). oh and keepass2android-offline for my password managing needs, which is synced to my homeserver using Termux (linux running on android, with certain differences/limitations).

For sacrificed functionality: my bank's website works just fine on mobile browsers. for the 2 factor auth, it uses something called "Mobile ID", seemingly a standard different from sms or app-specific ones, i'm not sure how widely available it is but it works great for me. Chatgpt says it's used in a couple of European countries. For buying public transport tickets, i used the website for a while, but in my country the website is kinda shitty compared to the mobile app, it takes like 15 clicks to get a ticket where on the app it's 3. so i went to apkmirror/apkpure (ad-infested websites that offer direct download of APKs without google acc) and got the app there - this is both a security risk and inconvenient, but in this case it works for me and i can buy tickets with the app without problems.

I used a degoogled phone for over 3 years (but mind you it was mostly through the pandemic).

1. Maps was the biggest challenge imo. Post pandemic, I needed to use maps and the alternatives were not great. It started off with MicroG and then I had no choice but to flash the google services.

2. Some payment apps do not work without google play services. There is a workaround by flashing Magisk but they would occasionally throw errors.

3. SD Card is the biggest life saver. You need to take backups of your data frequently and also keep emergency ROMs and custom firmware ready.

4. Some of your favorite apps may use Google on device APIs and may not work (this was the case with one of the food delivery service here).

5. For most of the custom ROMs you will not get updates. This means if there is a new version, you have to reflash the new version yourself. Since security updates are usually bundled with the ROM, every 3-4 months you may need to flash the updates.

6. If your device isn't well supported and you're only grabbing ROMs from random folks on the internet, there's a security gamble baked right in.

If youre a minimalist user, then you should be good for the most part.

I have been running de-googled LineageOS since before it renamed/reformed from CyanogenMod, so since somewhere around 2013/14. That has looked rather different depending on what exactly I need from my phone but I'll share what my current set up looks like.

First, I have don't use any kind of Google/Samsung/Apple Pay wallets so if you do, this may not be helpful; I've never looked into trying to get any of those working. Also, by "de-googled" I mean that I don't have GApps installed on my phone. I do have microG[0] installed as a Magisk[1]/LSPosed[2] module; this allows a few apps to believe I have GApps while most apps do not see/have access. I do not turn on microG for any apps (i.e. no connection to the Google servers/services via microG).

Most of my apps come from F-Droid[3], a few from Aurora Store[4] (a 3rd-party frontend for the Play Store that does not require either an account or GApps installed), a very few from FFupdater[5], and have played with using Obtanium[6] but currently only have one (weather) app updating via it. I have several different repositories configured in F-Droid but I don't generally keep mental track of which repository I am dependent on for which apps; the default, IzzyOnDroid[7], Bitwarden[8], NewPipe[9], microG[10], and Collabora[11] are some of them.

I have two banking apps installed via Aurora Store, one of which requires microG and root-hiding (via Magisk module) while the other doesn't require either. My browsers (Firefox, Firefox Klar, Brave) come from FFupdater and none require microG. My texting (QUIK SMS), email (K-9 Mail), TOTP authenticator (Aegis), password manager (Bitwarden), GPS/Maps (OsmAnd), file syncing (Nextcloud), notes (Nextcloud Notes), HN reader (HN), and Contacts/Calendar sync (DAVx5, ICSx5) apps all come via F-Droid (either the main repo or others). I have many others apps which come from F-Droid or Aurora Store but the above are my most used.

For file, calendar, notes, photo, & contact syncing, I have a Nextcloud server set up and find it to work quite well; the Nextcloud apps are also quite good. Someone who doesn't want to run their own could use a hosted account[12]. Contacts & calendars are synced to Nextcloud via DAVx5 & ICSx5.

The primary challenges I am aware of at this point are hardware (it is increasingly difficult to install LineageOS on most hardware due to bootloader locks), and navigation (OpenStreetMap data usually doesn't include addresses in the USA). For hardware, the solution is essentially just to properly research the phone you want to buy; I always make sure the model is well supported by LineageOS before purchasing and then tend to hang on to it for several years. For navigation, I usually find the address on my desktop or mobile browser (via DuckDuckGo) and then manually input the location into OsmAnd before the trip but I also keep WeGo Here maps installed in case I don't have time for that (it usually takes <2 minutes and rarely more than 5 to manually find & enter the address). Additionally, getting the one banking app to work without GApps was a pain in the butt initially (requiring testing several Magisk & LSPosed modules), but now it just works and I don't really think about it.

Overall, I don't find my version of de-googled to be a detriment; my phone is useful and I have more control over my data and over annoyances (such as unnecessary notifications) than I would otherwise.

[0] https://microg.org

[1] https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk

[2] https://github.com/mywalkb/LSPosed_mod

[3] https://f-droid.org

[4] https://aurorastore.org

[5] https://f-droid.org/packages/de.marmaro.krt.ffupdater | https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater

[6] https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.imranr.obtainium.fdroid/ | https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium

[7] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid

[8] https://mobileapp.bitwarden.com/fdroid

[9] https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo

[10] https://microg.org/fdroid.html

[11] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/downloads/fdroid/repo

[12] https://nextcloud.com/sign-up

As someone who does a lot of fitness, I'm pretty happy in the Garmin ecosystem.

Ecosystem, which don't allow me to download track from my watches to smartphone when I don't have internet access...

I don't say, that Google is better, but Garmin is not so good :-(

Honestly the more of these shutdowns I see over the years, the more I come to the conclusion that if you're relying on Google for anything that isn't Search, GMail or YouTube, you might as well consider that to be volatile data and you should look into alternatives (and then watch out that Google doesn't suddenly choose to acquire them). I can selfhost (and know enough about my tech stacks to unshittify a broken installation) but that's obviously not a solution for everyone and there's an increased standards capture going on with Big Tech to make that harder and harder these days.

GMail and YouTube are solely exempt because of some faint hope of government intervention if Google's internal brain bleed ever decides to kill those off. Which isn't a great thing to bet on. (Search is exempt because it's literally the main reason they're so massive.)

Google start searching a way to AI that can search links at internet and give you info immediately and how to integrate at those answers add. So, we can be pretty sure, when they found how to do this - Search will be deprecated too.

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262082

this is good news to be honest, as someone who has been using the Google Fit API, it has been an excruciating experience due to security checks they imposed. Having a simplified process to use that API, is something I can only welcome.

So the REST API has no replacement?

Why does anyone ever give Google money for anything at this point?

More like their time and energy. Provisionally free, but not worth it in the end. Arguably Google not charging actual end users for services up front is the root of this problem.

I pay for ad-free YouTube. I also pay for a ton of extra storage in Google drive.

I find the constantly closing down and shifting of services to be a slight annoyance but not really too impactful in my personal usage. For example, moving Google podcasts and YouTube music into YouTube has been a pretty sad degradation. But not really a deal breaker for me.

What I would never ever do is build a business on top of Google. They seem so cavalier about pulling the rug out from under you. I can only imagine if you have for example services running in Google cloud, how they would treat you if you were counting on a service that they thought wasn't worth it to maintain anymore. Shutting down apis that people were using like this just seems very on-brand for them to me.

Building any non super short term business on top of a unique, non interchangeable third party service is always a bad decision anyway.

Yet this entire site is based around building stuff on AWS services which push lockin

I would argue that there are good business to be built on top of AWS and Azure catering to the users of those services, and very little chance that Amazon or Microsoft would pull the rug out from under you based on their track records.

I happily pay for YouTube Premium.

I'm unhappy that I'm paying for Gsuite (or whatever it is called these days). I don't think there is a way to downgrade your account tied to your own domain to a free google account? If there is, I'll def do that and. I already use Fastmail anyway but there are too many stuff tied to my Google account (logins, google drive data etc)

Google drive data is probably the easiest part to get out.

I found out it was much more annoying to do the same for google photos. My partner created a tons of albums and last time I had a look at the google export you'd have to build your own parser to scrap the metadata and rebuild the albums locally. I wonder if someone already build this.

This might help: https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper

This is useful thanks although the goal of this tool is to put all photos in chronologically ordered folders. It doesn't seem to yet be able to recreate albums either by using folders and symlinks or (preferrably) adding tags in the exif metadata.

I'll give it a try with takeout again.

I bought a fitbit, and now it's Google.

For me it is to store encrypted backups of TBs of data on Google Drive. Simply because its the cheapest option (although its slow AF). I'd like to switch to something else if either the competition lowers prices or I make more monies :P

Isn't B2 cheaper for big volumes of data?

I am using 2TB for now. Google One annual is €99.99/year while B2 would cost $6x2x12=$144 ~= €134 .

Even for 5TB Google is cheaper. Unless B2 have an option for annual pricing and its not obvious from the pricing page.

Ah, Ok, fair enough.

For me "TBs" starts at 10TB :-) But, yes, even 2TB is terabytes, of course. My bad.

In my case, out of nostalgia for the Google of old. I paid for a Pixel phone and was very unimpressed with the experience, so much so that after a lifetime on Android I went and bought a brand new iDevice. Oddly enough I found Google Fit to be a nice app to use, fairly straightforward and without too much crud. Oh well, off to the Goog Graveyard it goes!

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