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Comment by jmcphers | Hacker News Reader

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled.

What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".

Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.

I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

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> The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos

Just to be clear: It will ask you before doing it.

If you refuse, it will ask you again and again and again. Sometimes with a slightly different prompt. Until you accidentally say yes.

But it does ask you.

Even though I agree with your overall conclusion that people should avoid google photos, this moment should also be a learning experience for your family to be more careful what they agree to. Popup fatigue is insidious, we all need to remain vigilant!

"It asks" doesn't matter when it doesn't actually tell you want the consequences of the choice are.

I've lost count the number of times by wife has accidently agreed to store all her google photos on the cloud then filled up her account. The prompts are very good at making you ~seem~ like you need to do it.

It’s super hostile. I realised I was going to press it by accident eventually so I switched to Fossify Gallery before I did.

It keeps asking every 1-2 days for me.

I don't use Photo because of this **t anymore except for Panoramas (ie very rarely).

Apple does the same thing with iCloud. I had to go through a lot of hoops to get my wife's photos back down locally on the computer.

Apple also by default backs up your apps to the cloud.

But it backs up the WHOLE package / folder / whatever terminology they use, including cached and redownloadable data. So if you have a game that has 10GB of cached data, it WILL upload that. Edge for me was >3GB.

And then they have the following user-hostile 'features':

    1. They offer a paltry 5GB. Hasn't changed since inception, but app sizes have ... tripped? I have 2GB of health data now. 
    2. They don't tell you that you're backing up data that can be retrieved elsewhere.
    3. The popup when storage is full shows only 'buy more' or ignore (no link/mention to disable individual app like described above)
    4. No way to backup to a NAS
    5. No way to backup to a computer automatically. You have to provide you passcode every time.

The Apple backup strategy is purposefully broken. I’m already paying for 50GB of iCloud and it often claims that it cannot backup my iPhone despite having multiple gigabytes free. It turns that that during the backup process it operates on a file level, so if you happen to have a large file it will require both copies of the file to fit within your storage limit before the backup can complete. And guess what, several third party apps I use store all their data in a single multi-gigabyte SQLite database that’s written to every day.

As for cached and downloadable data, I have long ago turned off backups for many apps where the data is stored on a server anyways. Backing up these apps never makes any sense.

That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.

> That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.

While it's the app developers that need to make the change, it should be enforced by Apple. After all, that's why there is a walled garden, and that is the premium we pay for when using Apple.

But for Apple to enforce this means less popups on screens telling people that storage is full, which means less sales.

And again, we get to Goodhart's law.

>I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

I try to pry myself away from Google. I've given up the Google Maps app, for the arguably slightly-less-worse Apple Maps. I'm now 95/5 Firefox/Chrome, but I still need Chrome for some things that simply do not work well on Firefox. Gmail is nearly impossible, if I had 6 months I might try to host my own email... but I don't even know how to avoid it. I can't NOT HAVE email, ISPs don't offer that as part of their internet service anymore. You can't host it without jumping through spam hoops meant to keep everyone but Gmail out of email. And I try to use DDG, but it's just abysmal compared to Google search in its heyday... even now, Google search is often slightly better.

All of it's just some tarbaby trap, and now that I'm stuck I can't get unstuck.

Happened to me too, almost identically. Clearly this is a pattern across the major consumer cloud app/service providers.

To be fair, Google sends out multiple emails notifying that you won't receive new emails unless you upgrade or clear things out. If they read their emails even somewhat regularly -- which I acknowledge isn't a given for many people -- they'd know what's coming.

That isn’t the problem. The problem is Google photos pushes you to back up your tens of gigabytes of photos to your free Gmail account repeatedly until you say yes just once. At that point it fills up your email account with your photos and then disables your email until you pay them. Making statements about how often they warn you this is happening isn’t very helpful. No normal person would think of that as a consequence of using Google photos.

That may as well take a couple hours if you're on a fast internet connection. Easily spent chatting with friends over coffee and cheesecake.

Drives me insane that to see my existing Google library and shared albums I must allow Google photos access to my phones photos - at which point it turns auto back on.

It also doesn't help that Google's free tier (15GB) is laughably small in 2026.

HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).

It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail.

People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this.

20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.

TBF that's a little bit apples-to-orchards, since publicly routed e-mails have certain expectable size/frequency characteristics compared to, say, all the videos someone possesses.

1GB that grew to 7GB over about 4 years and then 15GB over another 5 years. And has been stuck at 15GB for about 13 years. https://lifetourer.com/gmail-and-storage-capacity-cmon-googl...

The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.

It is small, but if you look at their competition it's still competitive.

Only Mega offers more for free (20GB).

Microsoft offers 5GB.

Ente.io offers 10GB.

Proton.io offers 2GB (if you jump through some time-limited hoops, most of which defeats the purpose of using a privacy cloud, you get a whooping 5GB free instead)

Filen.io offers 10GB, but you can get 30GB if you do a similar dance to proton and spam your referral code everywhere.

Notably Microsoft used to offer 15GB until decreasing it a decade ago.

So while I would say 15GB is pretty typical, I would not say it's competitive. I would say the competition died in 2013.

If the top offer is 15 GB, then 15GB is competitive, even if multiple providers offer it.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.

Competitive implies competition.

The competition ended over a decade ago, and 15GB stayed 15GB even though the price of providing it dropped 5x.

Even though they're near the top, none of those companies are "competitive" in my book.

> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached

How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.

Same thing happened to me and it did not default to lossy. Days later I got the "you will stop receiving email soon" warning in Gmail.

Disabled in the sense that you can no longer receive email (which for many is the primary purpose for a Google account), not that you can’t login.

FYI I am notoriously bad at taking photos (as is constantly explained to me by family and my partner) and my Phone has 130GiB of Photos and Videos on it as we speak.

It's not just the photos that you take going forward, but all the photos you already have stored on the device.

I know, but that's still thousands of photos at original quality, let alone with the default compression, for each member of their extended family present, not just some of them. I barely know a couple people stockpiling more photos than that, let alone an entire family.

It's 2026, year of decent cameras.

70 seconds long 4K video is 2GB.

Fair enough, I was thinking actual photos. Still, the whole extended family present had that much stockpiled on their phones? Still sounds unbelievable to me IDK.

I don't have strong opinion here, I just had this happen for all my immediate family members (dark pattern turning on the backup filling the Drive with the photos and videos from they nearly full phones).

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