David Pierce at The Verge writing about Google Podcasts going away and Google’s pattern of abandoning their own apps:

It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists…

@manton I saw this and pessimistically thought, "Why would anyone have faith in Google at this point?"

@manton this is why I miss the old "buy an app and you own it" paradigm.

@manton https://mastodon.social/@callionica/112202962031798201

@manton which is why I never put any time into their apps (apart from gmail, so far so good).

@manton Love when one of the world's largest companies gives a lame excuse like they are "simply responding to the market". The poor mega-corporation; their hands are tied and they have no resources to make their own software successful. 🙄

@manton I miss Google+.

@manton at this point they’re canceling stuff I’ve never heard of.

@MitchW I always found Google+ frustrating: that horribly regular grid, the ugly font, the absence of proper links and the forced use of a URL shortener. But I used it. Now, the thing I find frustrating is that I can’t use it any more.

@mingo I wouldn’t trust gmail either. You will outlive it. You want things that will outlive you