That's probably another reason why Google kills so many products that are successful, but not successful enough for Google's whole system to justify keeping them alive and secure.
The part that sucks for consumers is that they often kill things that people like. I wish they had a better way of doing this.
Bravo to brutecat for this excellent discovery, productionization, and writeup.
But I am getting more hesitant as often when I (and others) do it seems companies think they can increase their prices wildly or do other stuff.
I have this exact feeling now with Logseq: I started paying for sync a while ago and it seems so did others and now they are rewriting the whole thing from plain text[1] to some kind of database based storage :-/
[1]: which could be synced over git, transferred effortlessly into another application and was one of the reasons I went with Logseq
From Kagi’s website
https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#:~:te...
We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month.
Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs.
That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).
I’m honestly glad to hear that. Until I heard your interview with Gruber, I thought Kagi was the same company that use to provide a payment platform for Mac indie developers.
It’s always good to see a bootstrapped company become successful without enshittification. I put you up there with BackBlaze.
I see you have investors now (not saying that is a negative). Are the laws still the same about having to be a “qualified investor”? Can anyone invest - asking out of curiosity.
As sister comments have said there is no money in it. They are stickiness plays or just bets for Google.
That’s part of the stupidity of the DOJ trying to force Google to sell Chrome. Who would want it? And how would they profit from it?
All valid questions, but it might be that splitting the tool used to bludgeon everyone around is still worth it, even if pace of development slows down considerably.
Unless you are using Chromebooks, every desktop user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download it.
My point is that maybe it is okay? Runaway churn is at least partially responsible for current situation, where most companies simply unable to compete.
Apple has no reason to compete, it can just make more and more functionality for native apps as can Google if it doesn’t have to worry about Chrome anymore.
Microsoft doesn’t care about the browser anymore and just uses Chromium. Firefox’s revenue comes completely from Google. If Google doesn’t have to prop up Firefox for antitrust reasons anymore, why would they?
Photos redesign makes it really hard to use.
Siri works half of the times, maybe even less than that.
Books lacks of basic functionalities such as downloading and keeping books on device.
Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked. All of the functionality is there and there’s a new consistency in how it works that wasn’t there previously.
Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.
A simple google search will answer this question
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24340238/apple-iphone-alar...
Even an hn search is fine, if you do not trust the Verge (notice these are comments from the last 3 months so not an old issue):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962418
> Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.
Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.
> Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked.
Perfect, then keep Photos and kill only alarms, books and Siri.
I haven’t used Books extensively outside of audiobooks. So it sounds like there’s offloading of caching going on that’s iCloud wide; disabling iCloud sync would fix this. I can imagine that being frustrating if the book you want isn’t there when you’re on a flight (which should only happen if you haven’t recently accessed it). I agree there should be a way to prevent this. I wouldn’t call that half baked, but it’s a big enough problem I’d agree that’s not fully thought through (or more likely, they did think through it but came to a different conclusion).
Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded. There is a setting to automatically remove downloads once you're finished with the book, but that defaults to off (and I didn't even realize it was there until I went looking just now).
This is objectively false. I suggest you do a simple google search or read my other comment.
I just checked my phone, I have 169 books downloaded. This includes many books I haven't looked at for years and years. This includes many books that I bought 3, 4, 5 iPhones ago and are still present, copied from device to device, because Books does not remove store downloads unless asked to.
It's happened for years: it was pretty bad about 5/6 years ago, but Apple claimed they fixed it, but it's still happening a bit.
In fact, when I really need to wake up at a particular time (say for a flight), I set two alarms 1 minutes apart.
Go to library > collections > downloaded.
I can see books I purchased and other PDFs that I uploaded.
I do agree on the Photos redesign. I feel like I constantly get stuck on certain pages.
Your tone is aggressive and uncalled for. In fact, the fact that you have never found a very common bug says a lot about your inattention to detail.
There's no "keep forever on device" button, which to me seems like a basic functionality. If the app decides to delete them, it will.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1b04rzy/apple_what_wer...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23736536
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/344271/books-autom...
iCloud offload is a pretty common feature on Apple devices and one that I find pretty handy. I understand why it doesn’t work for others though.
You can turn off iCloud sync in general for the device.