Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.
I know, I know, using Google apps isn’t the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.
Apparently they’re moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts aren’t implemented yet.
I’ve moved over to an app from F-Droid.
It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.
No kidding.
It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can’t create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.
Android users literally run their lives out of Google Calendar. Think you can share your calendar with a friend from your phone? Think again. It’s back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!
Oh you’re not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phone’s browser. I dare you.
It’s unbelievable that so much of the gsuite on mobile web doesn’t seem to have been even touched in nearly a decade. It’s insane to me that they’re just ignoring that part of their own website even as it’s easily accessible.
On the mail side:
Reporting phishing isn’t something an iOS user would ever do. Desktop please!
Filters? What’re those? To the desktop, come on!
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.