Things like Reader, location-based reminders ("remind me when I get home to..."), controlling my oven via the Assistant, Fitbit with Google workspace accounts, and now Maps timeline.
Like... I will just find replacements for all those and further myself even more from the Google ecosystem. What benefits does Google get out of killing these popular features?
Engineers at Google only understand how understaffed projects get shut down—it’s because there isn’t enough staff on the project to keep updating to work with Google’s changing infrastructure. This isn’t the root cause, though, it’s just a contributing factor. Maybe if Google infrastructure changed less, some of these projects would stick around longer with reduced staff.
Googles infrastructure evolves reasonably quickly - so most reasonably large services will need quite a few code changes every year just to keep up with the fact that internal database type X is going away and everyone needs to migrate to database Y which might have subtly different semantics requiring bits of your service be rewritten.
There is also a gradual flow of legal/privacy mandates (eg. as of Y date, IP addresses must not flow through technology Z because we now have to consider them personal information)
At some point, one of these migrations requires a lot of work, and there aren't enough humans really keen on doing the work, so it gets shut down.
Management could assign workers to do the work, but generally maintaining stuff isn't good for the career path, so few volunteer for big but non-impactful projects like this. As soon as the 'founders' of a project have moved on, it is vulnerable to this kind of shutdown.
It’s the “database X is going away” that really, really kills an understaffed project.
I find this an unsatisfying explanation (to be clear, I'm not criticising you but the effect you're describing), if we develop to interfaces as a principle, then underlying implementations shouldn't matter.
You see weird stuff when you scale to Google scale. I know it’s cliché to talk about “Google scale” but bear with me for a moment. If you are just running some little service, maybe you have a local filesystem and a SQLite database and that’s enough. If you grow, maybe you have a few machines, network storage, and a PostgreSQL server with a hot replica. If you grow, maybe you have distributed storage and you shard your database across multiple servers. If you keep growing, maybe you end up with Google’s situation, where you have filesystems like Colossus and databases like Spanner.
These systems didn’t appear overnight. Someone at Google made a distributed database, and after iterations and evolution, we got Spanner, which is now a Google cloud product you can use yourself.
There was a lot of interface breakage on the road to getting something like Spanner. Now that Spanner is a Google cloud offering, you can bet your ass that the interface is stable. It just takes a long time to get there, and the internal customers (Google teams building products) don’t want to wait for the stable, final iteration of some infrastructure to arrive. Nobody knows like that looks like until you suffer through the growing pains of building it.
It seems to be motivated by actual privacy concerns with Google keeping an exhaustive history of users' precise and semantic locations on Google servers, in particular the increasing use of geofence warrants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/14/google-...).
Which is interesting considering how bloated Google seems to be.
You can't just leave it alone, it's easier to shut it down and save yourself another accident and subsequent postmortem.
> The company plans to sunset web access and switch to a more private, on-device approach. This would make Google Maps’ Timeline data unique to each connected phone — as the migration would deactivate the universal sync mechanism.
So even though they're killing the feature as it exists today, they're replacing it with something more secure. What's wrong here exactly?
When I saw this reasoning my immediate assumption was that they made the decision first, then came up with this excuse in order to keep up appearances and conceal the _real_ reason, (which I would guess is something like "they're undertaking a project which involves making large changes to google maps in order to increase revenue, and the work needed to make desktop maps timeline compatible with these changes isn't deemed worthwhile since it doesn't have many users and doesn't directly create revenue").
Google is tired of giving the cops your location. For once they are doing a good thing.
One could argue that loss leaders help keep people using Google, but I suspect that’s at odds with how things work at Google.