Google just killed my project | Hacker News Reader

Google just killed my project

13 pointsothmanosx10 comments

For the past year, I’ve been building GM Pro — a Chrome extension that upgrades the chat experience inside Google Meet.

It started simple: reactions, replies, mentions, dark mode for chat. Then I added auto-join, auto-mute, transcription tools, lobby notifications, attendee shuffling. Basically all the things you wish Meet chat had by default.

People loved it. 5-star reviews. Steady installs. Real usage.

And then, after many years of lackluster chat, Google announced they’re integrating Meet chat directly with Google Chat — persistent conversations, reactions, file sharing, the works.

Which means… the exact surface area I built on top of is becoming a first-party feature.

On one hand, this validates the idea. The direction was right. The need was real.

On the other hand, platform risk just punched me in the face.

When you build on top of a giant platform, you’re effectively prototyping features for them. If the feature works, they absorb it. If it doesn’t, you disappear quietly. Either way, they win.

Now I’m thinking through:

Do I pivot to power-user tools Google won’t prioritize?

Double down on automation and workflow features?

Move away from chat and toward meeting intelligence?

Or accept that consumer Chrome extensions sitting on core UI are inherently fragile?

Curious how other builders here think about platform dependency.

Have you ever had your product “Sherlocked” by the platform you’re building on? What did you do next?

I can understand your frustration, but this is one case where this is such an obvious product decision it would be a criminal for Google to keep meet and chat separate. Perhaps they took inspiration from Teams or many other chat products that integrate the two. The surprise is that they didn't just do this in the first place. This being Google, that is no surprise though.

I'm sorry your project got pulled. You may or may not want to hear this but I would love if your talents were layered on, say Matrix/Element or XMPP, in part because I want those projects strong and they don't have the same risk of killing your project.

But I admit that's more ideological.

Question about your project: was there any warning? Any sign Google was taking inspiration from you?

Its laughable to think a corporation got inspired by this tiny extension for obvious chat features. Its just an overlap.

Not at all, Google's programmers are real people (I even know one!) and they're aware of feedback and usage, and someone real has to build the features. Moreover there's long historical precedent for features supported via extensions showing up in the core browser. Also it was a question rather than an assumption? I feel like I covered my bases on that one.

I can’t say this with certainty, but ever since I started building it, I’ve noticed updates and fixes that quietly addressed some of the workarounds I relied on for certain features. It almost felt like they were aware of the gaps I was tapping into. Considering they review the extension, you could read that as a subtle signal… but that might just be me connecting dots that aren’t really there.

For years, the Meet chat barely changed. It stayed minimal and uninspiring. So seeing Google suddenly invest attention in it caught me off guard. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Or maybe they did notice that some users were frustrated enough to start building their own tools just to make the experience better.

Looks like it only had 130 users and as far as I can tell, you weren't making money from it, so I'd move onto something else, and accept that it's the nature of the beast when augmenting a platform that's out of your control.

Keep the project and results as a resume item. Take what you've learnt into that next project.

I've never heard of Google Meet, but I usually see the successful devs who get Sherlocked are the ones who jump to a bigger pond.

As for platform dependency you want to have all your code internal and an API layer negotiating between the platforms' API (DOM/browser/rest/firebase/aws etc anything that isn't code you wrote) and your code

Then after accepting that the google specific stuff is a write off you can see how much work you are doing for yourself vs for google. Once you have that distinction you can make a velocity/ownership, feature orchestration/feature providing tradeoff

Following that you could quickly swap over to using Google's or Zooms or whoevers APIs (Meet add-ons SDK)

You still built it and learned a lot. I think that is what really counts. Learn from this one and build another cool project

This reads like a Linkedin post, I'm sure A) you can make something else B) you didn't think this would last forever

Good luck!

"sherlocked"

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