So they're replacing the Google Fit APIs with Health Connect (https://developer.android.com/health-and-fitness/guides/heal...) which claims to be based on a set of standards but I can't seem to find which. Can anybody shed light on this and the background behind this migration?
I don't know from a developer perspective, but I already used this in some apps.
Basically if you have your "health device" (e.g. smartwatch, smart scale, ...) from manufacturer X which has an app, and you want to use a Tracking App Y (e.g. MyFitnessPal, Google Fit/Health, ...) and they both implement the Health Connect APIs, then you can setup a connection between those apps and toggle which stats they can exchange e.g. from the health device manufacturer your weight, your steps, your heartrate etc, and from the tracking app your meals you have logged and so on.
The last time I used this (has been a while) this was also integrated into the Android System Settings and was a relative "native" experience.
You've got it right. Health Connect is a full replacement and gives users more control. This is a win for users and not a "killed by Google" situation.
Has Google launched one successful new product in the last 10-15 years? Not acquired and polished it up, that they can usually do, but actually launched themselves.
Google Fit APIs were deprecated in favor of Health Connect, which gives users more control of their data (and is used by Google Fit itself). This is a win for users, not your usual killed by Google product.
> Has Google launched one successful new product in the last 10-15 years?
What exactly is considered a success here? That it lives on for at least a decade? More than N active users per month?
I think the reason they graveyard so many products is because their line of "successful" is much higher than what a scrappy startup would consider success. So even products with thousands of active users would be put to their death bed instead of iterated upon.
Sure, but that sounds like an awful business strategy. I would imagine people who have been burned by google dropping support being less likely to use new google products in the future
So where can I buy the original Pixel, new, with warranty, and with the latest software? I can't, because new version have come out since, just like, for example, Google's chat applications have been "killed", but a new version has always been made
Pixel is a line of hardware products, and to stay competitive in Google's target market, new hardware releases are essentially necessary. Likewise the common thinking in the industry (correct or not, and most likely case-by-case) is that keeping production of older models up and running isn't viable. That's the same reason you can't get first-gen iPhones anymore.
With software, you have the benefit of not having to scrap the entire product at once -- you can keep the sites, domains, brand, whatever -- and because the vast majority of users on something like Hangouts used the official client, you could get away with arbitrary API and interface changes without losing (nearly as much) brand momentum.
Is this really preventing users from using old hardware? Are old devices being bricked?
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see drivers getting open sourced when they're going out of support, but on its own, not doing so isn't preventing people from using old hardware in most cases.
In any case, in your opinion, does a successful hardware product have to open-source its drivers and specs at EOL? Is any other hardware product a failure by that metric?
Picasa -> Photos was actually a new thing, right? Photos is cloud-hosted while Picasa was a program you installed on your computer and had web-sharing abilities.
Google Talk was the original one, then transitioning to Hangouts, while Allo and Duo were created too (I supposed to compete with Apple's iMessage and FaceTime), which also died, and finally we got to today with Google Chat and Google Meet.
I think they mean turn by turn navigation, which launched in late October 2009 and so barely fits in the 15 year window. You could say that it's a feature of Google Maps, but since it relied on maps that Google made instead of licensed map data, that feature was a much larger undertaking than the previous Google Maps product to that point.
That’s semantics. It started as an X project and was pulled out into Alphabet under Larry when they made the Alphabet change. Now that Sundar is CEO at both levels the distinction between the two entities has become fuzzy again.
It just became available in my area last month (and I've been pretty happy with it after recently switching). What makes you think it's stopped rolling out?
Wikipedia suggests that they stopped expanding in 2016, only resuming in 2022.
I hadn't heard about the resumption, and it is welcome news. I suspect however that many people, especially those outwith the United States, are in the same position of ignorance.
Though after ruining city streets, in a drastic utter failure of basic civil engineering, and then entirely exiting a city in disgrace [1] they've left a lot of doubt and mistrust in their continued expansion "efforts".
My aunt lost her Android phone. I thought I knew of a cool way to show her to find it using Timeline in Maps. We could maybe tell where it last was located? No luck because Google has discontinued Timeline in Maps from desktop it's now only available on the phone on Android.
"Timeline is no longer available on web browsers. To view or change your Timeline settings, go to Activity controls."
I think Google did this to protect their users from snooping. If they have everybody's timeline on their servers, governments can request that information. And governments like to do that:
Another disastrous thing is the miriade of settings in the Google app
Me and my mother share a Google One account to have more storage for photos and turns out that we share the calendar.
I really tried to find out how the fuck i disable it but nothing, i got in a 2008 ass settings page in the search of how to disable it but nothing. Settings page only available on desktop, the mobile version was the 2008 style page.
What's the consistency there?
But the most important part, why the fuck would you make it a default?
If I'd want a watch that can track metrics like heart and blood, and especially also sleep, has a battery life in the 1-week range (rather than 1-day range), does not require a phone (especially not for setup, but ok if it optionally can use one as additional UI or for local file transfer), and allows getting daily/hourly/... data of the metrics it tracks as a CSV or similar file onto my desktop computer in some way, what are some good suggestions here?
Polar have a desktop app and I didn't need to set up my Polar V watch via a phone (although I do use the phone app). No idea about the hourly data. The battery lasts 4-5 days.
If you don't want to depend on a huge corporation with your watch, consider PineTime running free software. (Although at the moment it's not in stock.)
Hopefully I have my backup from Google Reader [1]. One more thing, what was incredible about Google Reader is that you can go back in time to the blog because they indexed previous RSSs.
> They reduced the team sizes in the US but are claiming that global team sizes and roadmap are not changing
I have no reason to suspect that the person who tweeted that believes what he's saying, but Google has a track record of publicly denying rumors of a project being killed only to kill it days or weeks later (Stadia)
Yes, and that page does not list Dart or Flutter, the projects you made false claims about. Writing something that turned out to not be true is understandable, anyone can get fooled by misinformation and pass it on.
What's not acceptable is that after being called out on it, you didn't admit you were wrong and retract the falsehoods. You're instead apparently doubling down on some kind of bizarro "they canceled some other projects in the past, so it's cool for me to brazenly lie about these ones having just been canceled" defence.
I had to look this up because I hadn’t heard Google dropped support for Flutter or Dart. From the article you shared, they laid off staff for Flutter and Dart but they did not cut support outright.
Google more than most other companies deserves being bashed at every opportunity but this is completely misleading. Your second link is a borderline delusional rambling. Product APIs going down is also far from a Google exclusive practice.
Could you have some serious sources about Google dropping support for Flutter and Dart?
I mean, words have meanings. It's not because Google laid off part of the teams that worked on those technologies that it means that they dropped support of them.
Edit: I found this article which does shed more light: https://www.medm.com/company/blog/2024/what-is-health-connec...
In short, according to this, Health Connect removes the dependency on a Google account and stores data locally.
It also looks like this has been deprecated since 2022, and was slated for shutdown in 2024 which has been moved to 2025.