Google Now was the better phone assistant, no AI or LLMs needed

dantheclamman@lemmy.world to Android@lemdro.id – 273 points –
Google Now was the better phone assistant, no AI or LLMs needed
9to5google.com
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Not to be dramatic but same. For me it was Now, Inbox, then Play Music; the last being the final straw. The replacements for those services being notably worse showed they don’t give two shits about the end user experience. And don’t get me started on the messaging debacle.

Play Music was brilliant. Now we have that POS named YouTube Music that is impossible to manage your songs, because that turd mixes songs with regular YouTube videos and playlists that have nothing to do with music.

I have Tidal now, way better than anything else. Screw.you, Google.

Play Music pulled me away from my alternative sources of music. I used to keep a gigantic library of acquired music. I'm going back to old means now that YouTube music seems to be going down weird routes and adding functions that absolutely do not benefit me. Samples and comments? No thanks.

Only thing keeping me subscribed is YouTube premium. I watch a lot of YouTube content.

Annoying yes but at least these days there's one check box in the settings that turns off the connection between likes in YouTube and YouTube music.

Yes, since Play Music went down I switched to Spotify. Not really happy either but the best alternative for the moment IMO. Also slowly migrating my email to proton.

Now, Inbox, Reader and Play Music. Not that it was available in my country, but I think Google fibre was around the same time. I guess you could throw Google Chrome pulling internet standards forward rather than regressing them, into that box too.

Google was really on to a run of genuine winners at that point, weren't they? It's kinda a shame to see that all of the replacements really still are several steps behind what we had.

I know now that this trajectory almost seems inevitable for any big tech company now, but imagine where we would be now if Google had kept making genuinely good products and improvements.