We ranked 50 failed Google products from best to worst
Google services and products have enriched the lives of tech fans, businesspeople, and basically anyone who’s ever been curious enough to ask a question on the internet.
We all know about Search, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, and, of course, Android. We’ve recently seen new names added to the Google hall of fame too — most notably the Pixel smartphone brand and Google Assistant-powered Home smart devices.
What about Google’s epic fails?
For all the Mountain View company’s many, many successes, a bunch of apps, devices, and other products it birthed or acquired ultimately floundered and died, often killed in unceremonious fashion.
Websites like Google Cemetery and Killed by Google (as well as Ars Technica‘s Google Kills Product series) are dedicated to tracking the big G’s dead products, so we thought it’d be fun to sift through the corpses and put together a list of the most interesting failed Google projects.
Here are the top 50 products in the Google Graveyard, ranked from best to worst!
Google Nexus (2010 – 2016)
Oh, Nexus. One of the saddest casualties of Google’s axe, the Nexus smartphone series should require no introduction to regular Android Authority readers. While the “core” Android experience lives on with the Pixel line and Android One phones, the Nexus brand gave us some of the greatest handsets ever made, offering killer specs at affordable prices. Google never officially killed the Nexus series, but after three years in the wilderness, it’s time to say goodnight, sweet prince. We miss you.
Related: The most important Android smartphones since the Google Nexus 5
Project ARA (2014 – 2016)
This short-lived project was definitely one of the best concepts nuked by Google. The idea was to divide all major smartphone components into modular parts. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars upgrading the entire phone, customers would simply upgrade a specific component. The ambitious blueprint was diluted over time until Google eventually pulled the plug altogether. This hurts even more in hindsight, as phones continue to surge past the $1,000 mark.
Google Reader (2005 – 2013)
Google launched Reader in 2005 as a free tool to easily aggregate RSS-enabled feeds from multiple sites. Google admitted Reader had “a loyal following,” but still decided to shut down the service as part of its brutal Spring cleaning in 2013, citing a decline in usage. You can still aggregate your content feeds using Feedly and other RSS platforms on desktop, and on Android thanks to a bunch of RSS apps available via the Google Play Store. Many still mourn its loss.
Google Talk (2005 – 2017)
Before Hangouts, Allo, Messages, and Duo, we had Google Talk — Google’s first and probably best messaging app. The service was free and integrated into Gmail, letting you send and receive instant messages within Google’s email client from any device. There were also Google Talk apps for Android, Windows, and Blackberry phones. You could even use Talk to place a real-time video call with a paid Google Voice account. Times changed, though, and Google’s (doomed) desire to plug everything through Google Plus spelled the end for Talk. It was slowly phased out for Hangouts, which later evolved into an enterprise-focused pair of apps for G Suite. Don’t worry, Google has plenty of other apps and services for your messaging and voice needs — too many.
Chromecast Audio (2015 – 2019)
Chromecast Audio was an offshoot of Google’s popular media caster that let users syphon digital music libraries through to non-smart speakers via a 3.5mm jack or mini-TOSLINK socket. The Chromecast Audio was discontinued in January 2019. I still use mine almost every day.
Inbox by Gmail (2014 – 2019)
Google launched Inbox as a Gmail offshoot with a more experimental slant. Innovative features like Smart Reply, snoozing, bundling, and much more gave the Inbox app an AI-powered edge over the standard Gmail client — at least until 2018. Gmail’s redesign incorporated most of Inbox’s smarts. Promises that the product would carry on as normal proved hollow as later that year Google called time on Inbox. Users have until March 2019 to switch to an alternative email app. Sad times.
Google Play Editions (2013 – 2015)
The precursor to Android One, Google Play Edition phones were essentially regular smartphones made by Samsung, HTC, and other OEMs with stock Android. Almost exclusively available to buy direct from Google, the series included Google Play versions of beloved phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4, Moto G, and HTC One. We don’t necessarily want Play Editions back in their previous incarnation, but we’d sure love to see more Android One-ified models hit the market.
iGoogle (2005 – 2013)
The horribly-named iGoogle was an interactive home page for your browser packed with web-based “gadgets.” You could add and remove gadgets (simple widgets) or move them around within the browser window to fit your needs. Google said the need for iGoogle “eroded over time” due to the maturing capabilities of websites and mobile apps. Plenty of websites and Chrome extensions attempt to recreate iGoogle’s widget-based pages, but they’ll never match the magic of the real thing.
Project Tango (2014 – 2018)
Tango was another stepping stone project for Google. Sensing the dawn of an augmented future for consumer tech (which still hasn’t really arrived), Google built the Tango API for its AR ambitions. We got two Tango phones — the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and Asus Zenfone AR — before the project was canned in favor of ARCore, an SDK far less hardware-reliant than Tango that only needed a decent smartphone camera to work.
Read more: Tango was Google’s too soon moonshot, but ARCore can do better
QuickOffice (2004 – 2014)
Before Google acquired it, QuickOffice was the go-to office suite for Symbian and Palm devices. It also delivered the de facto document, spreadsheet, and presentation editing apps for Android, before Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides came along. A redundant service by today’s standards, QuickOffice was a superb alternative to Microsoft Office for mobile platforms.
Bump! (2009 – 2014)
If you ever owned an Apple smartphone between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 6 eras, you’ll probably remember Bump! As the name suggests, Bump was a clever little app that involved bumping two phones together to share photos and files with other users. The app sat at number eight in Apple’s all-time top ten charts for free apps in 2011 and amassed hundreds of millions of downloads. It also released on Android, but all versions stopped working after Google bought Bump Technologies and terminated the app’s functionality, all within the space of around four months. A sad end for a hugely popular and incredibly useful app.
Google URL Shortener (2009 – 2018)
Created as a simple tool to shorten web addresses, Google shut down goo.gl just shy of its tenth birthday. As well as shortening URLs, goo.gl links could also send web surfers directly to specific apps on iOS and Android. Google cited changes to how people access webpages and content as its reason for discontinuing the URL-shrinking service, but it’ll be sad to see the funky-looking short URLs go offline for good on March 30, 2019.
Google Desktop (2004 – 2011)
This was a nifty sidebar program you could install on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It placed a search toolbox on your desktop for scanning through local files, and offered quick access to a clock, weather, news feed, Gmail feed, and photos stored locally on the PC, among other things. Google killed off Desktop as it began to focus more on cloud storage. It was a useful bit of software that naturally became obsolete as desktop OS’ began to offer similar built-in features.
Google Fast Flip (2009 – 2011)
Before Google News, the Mountain View firm had a news aggregator called Fast Flip. The Google Labs project collected news from across the world and presented them in a clever, microfiche-esque style using text and images.
Google Labs (2006 – 2011)
Google Labs was a playground for experimental projects and was responsible for a lot of the abandoned projects listed in this article. The platform ran for five years, during which time “adventurous users” got to have some fun testing Google’s experiments and provide direct feedback to the engineers and researchers. At the time, Google’s stance was to “launch early and often,” but that seemingly changed when former CEO Larry Page said the company needed to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Several days later, Google announced the closure of Google Labs, citing Page’s cumbersome wood-based analogy.
Google SMS Search (2004 – 2013)
For a time, Google SMS Search was the company’s solution to wanting to look things up without having internet access. It let mobile phone users text queries (weather reports, sports updates, currency conversions, and the like) to a pre-set number. That number was 466453, which just so happens to spell Google on alphanumeric keypads. Clever!
Google Gears (2007 – 2011)
Gears was an open-source browser extension that enabled web-based apps to run offline. That sounds great, so why is it dead? All those features were built into HTML5 and hard-coded into web browsers, which completely eliminated Gears purpose for existing when the new platform launched. At the time, it was a noble solution to a common problem faced by web app devs.
Google Now (2012 – 2016)
A necessary evil to get us to the promised land of Google Assistant, Google Now was a Search feature with nascent voice support that bombarded Google app and Android users with predictive information cards. Assistant’s improved AI would eventually streamline all of Now’s more cluttered UI elements and transform Now’s stilted, one-way conversations into something a little more natural. It was still way better than Siri though. Siri sucks.
Nexus Player (2014 – 2018)
After failing to get the Nexus Q off the ground (more on that later) and with its semi-replacement Google Chromecast flying high, Google turned to Asus and Intel for help with its efforts to bring its nascent Android TV platform to the masses. Despite receiving support for two years after its discontinuation, Google never really got behind its full-fledged digital media player, instead focusing on Chromecast and letting other, better Android TV boxes represent the OS.
Google Moderator (2008 – 2015)
Made famous by then President-elect Barack Obama, Moderator was designed to aggregate a huge pool of user-submitted questions and suggestions based on crowdsourced feedback. A smart idea for sure, but Google eventually took the site offline citing low usage.
Panoramio (2005 – 2016)
Panoramio was a service purchased by Google in 2007 that relied on user-submitted geo-located tagged photos. Google incorporated Panoramio into Google Earth so that users could see additional views of a specific area. Despite the high volume of image uploads by 2016, Google decided to sunset Panoramio in favor of Google Maps for mobile and the Local Guides program. Not a bad product by any means, but certainly a redundant one by the time of its demise.
Urchin (2005 – 2012)
Urchin was the precursor to Google Analytics, a service which would become far and away the most useful web analytics program on the market. Mark this one up as another product on this list that’s more notable for what came after it.
Helpouts (2013 – 2015)
Not to be confused with Hangouts, Helpouts was basically a user-led online helpdesk for anything and everything where “providers” could get paid for offering online support and tutorials. Another service shuttered due to lack of growth, Helpouts was a great idea and, in theory, paved the way for altruistic apps like Be My Eyes. In reality, it was too closely linked with Google Plus’ lackluster ecosystem. It also forced experts to cough up 20 percent of their revenue, which was as unpopular as you might expect.
Orkut (2004 – 2014)
One of the many failed social media apps from Google to make this list (shoutout to Jaiku, which narrowly missed a spot), Orkut gets a higher spot than the others because it enjoyed a brief spurt of popularity in Brazil and India in the late noughties before going right in the bin like every other Google social media platform.
GOOG-411 (2007 – 2010)
GOOG-411 was a telephone directory service that connected callers to relevant business in the U.S. and Canada using voice recognition technology. Unsurprisingly, most people carried on using the traditional 411 line, but apparently the voice data Google collected was integral in early development of voice services like Google Now and, eventually, Google Assistant. It gets a slightly higher ranking just for that.
Google Allo (2016 – 2019)
What if WhatsApp had a digital assistant? It’s a question no one asked, but Google answered it anyway. The Allo messaging app suffered from a serious identity crisis. It wasn’t quite a typical instant messenger, but also definitely wasn’t built for SMS. Many of Allo’s features — like Smart Reply and desktop support — have transferred to Google’s Messages app, and Allo itself will perish for good in March 2019.
Related: How to export your Google Allo chat history and media files
Picasa (2002 – 2016)
Originally developed by Lifescape, Picasa was a free image organizer and editor for Linux, MacOS, and Windows that Google purchased in 2004. Google discontinued the desktop program in 2016 to focus solely on its successor, Google Photos. While some desktop users still mourn Picasa’s loss, the cross-platform support of Google Photos is a huge improvement.
Google Latitude (2009 – 2013)
Latitude allowed smartphone owners to disclose their current location on Google Maps via a Google account. This opt-in service was a good way to keep up with friends and family wherever they were, but only if they shared their location. As part of a Maps redesign, Google chose to discontinue Latitude and integrate its check-in and location features into Google Plus — and we all know how that worked out. Unfortunately for Google, Latitude has become something of a footnote for online check-ins as Facebook’s equivalent feature — introduced in 2010 — is now the de facto way of letting folks know where you are in the world.
Google Code (2006 – 2016)
Google shut down its project hosting service in 2016. For ten years the platform served as a hub for developers, giving them tools to store their code, control revisions, document the project’s progression, and more. Google decided to shut down the service a decade after its creation and moved around 1,000 of its own projects to GitHub, which continues to grow in popularity, and is unquestionably a far superior platform.
Google Body (2010 – 2011)
You’ve probably heard of at least a handful of entries on this list, but there’s a good chance you had no idea Google had a web app for showing 3D models of the human body. You also probably didn’t know that on April Fools’ Day 2011, the site showed a cow instead of a human body. That’s right, there was a Google Cow. It’s honestly a crime this got shut down.
Google Spaces (2016 – 2017)
Yet another Google messaging app that died a quick death, Spaces let users create private group chats for sharing links, photos, and videos. The big selling point was direct integration with YouTube, Chrome, and Search, but no one took any notice and carried on using Messenger, WhatsApp, and other non-Facebook owned social apps. It’ll officially be dead in April 2019.
Dodgeball (2005 – 2007)
Dodgeball was a text-based predecessor to Google Latitude. It let users know when friends and interesting places were nearby. One of the original creators, Dennis Crowley, went on to co-found Foursquare (which built on Dodgeball’s core concepts) after becoming frustrated by Google’s lack of support for the service. Dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dead.
Google Chrome Apps (2010 – 2017)
Google’s attempt to create a utopia of Chrome-based web apps fell on deaf ears, with the company admitting that only one percent of Windows, Mac, and Linux users used Chrome packaged apps a year before its death. Progressive Web Apps are the future, don’t you know?
Google Video (2005 – 2012)
Google Video was a free platform where users could upload video clips for the whole world to see. Google Video came up against impossible competition from YouTube, so Google did what Google is wont to do — it bought YouTube.
Google Listen (2009 – 2012)
The release of Google Podcasts in 2018 saw the big G entering the hotly contested podcast app arena, but it wasn’t Google’s first stab at podcast apps on the Play Store. Google Listen didn’t last long, however, as other, better podcast apps pushed it down the charts and eventually into oblivion.
Google Catalogs (2011 – 2015)
Back when tablets were the hottest new thing in consumer tech, Google waded into the space with Catalogs — a tablet-focused app hosting virtual product catalogs for a variety of retailers. Those same retailers quickly realized they were better off having their own apps, leaving Catalogs as something of a forgotten relic.
Google Schemer (2011 – 2014)
Imagine a bucket list site your friends and family could see online and you’ve basically got Google Schemer. The service was another victim of Google Plus’ unfulfilled ambition to be the Next Big Thing.
Google Answers (2002 – 2006)
Intended for inquisitive people to ask the internet hive mind questions for cash bounties, Answers eventually devolved into a mad house dominated by trolls and spammers. It was replaced with Google Questions and Answers, which also shut down in 2014. Nowadays we have algorithm-based Google Search Answer Boxes for all of our quick-fire questions.
Google Ride Finder (2007 – 2009)
Did you know Google had a ride-hailing service before Uber was even a thing? Ride Finder used the user’s geolocation to find nearby taxis, shuttles, or carpools in 14 U.S. cities. The limited service meant it never really caught on. Uber was formed the same year Ride Finder died and the rest, as they say, is history. It gets some bonus points for being first though.
Google Health (2008 – 2012)
Google Health was a centralized personal health record service where U.S. users could upload their medical data. It was beset by privacy concerns and closed by Google after failing to make a “broad impact.”
Google Sidewiki (2009 – 2011)
Confusingly not a wiki-like platform in the slightest, Sidewiki was essentially a comment section for any website hosted by Google as a browser extension. Website owners hated it.
Nexus Q (2012 – 2013)
Hailed by Google as the ultimate digital media player, the Nexus Q was intended to showcase the magic of technologies like NFC and Android Beam to control all media within the home. Less than a year after its grand reveal at Google I/O 2012, the spherical “social” hub was quietly nixed before it even hit shelves. Preview units were sent out to those who pre-ordered the $300 device for free, but a commercial release was quietly abandoned after the Nexus Q received a truckload of criticism over its high price tag and comparatively limited features.
Google Wave (2010 – 2012)
In the dark days before Slack, we had Google Wave. The web-based collaborative tool borrowed its name from the (excellent) Firefly TV series, enabling users to work together in so-called “waves.” Everyone accessing a single wave could see the other participants type letter by letter in real time as if chatting through an instant messenger. All edits were stored via a timeline, allowing you to see what was edited and when. If that all sounded a bit convoluted and open to abuse, that’s because it was. Google abandoned the project shortly after Wave’s public launch and handed it over to the Apache Software Foundation, which rebranded the service Apache Wave — which it eventually retired in 2018.
Google Offers (2011 – 2014)
After trying and failing to buy Groupon in 2010 for a reported $6 billion, Google decided to take a crack at the deal-of-the-day-style coupon market with its own service, Google Offers. Groupon is still going (for now), Google Offers was canned after three years. That tells you all you need to know really.
Google Dictionary (2010 – 2011)
Why would you need a Google-made Dictionary when websites found through Search already provide all the answers? You wouldn’t!
Google Goggles (2010 – 2018)
A dumb version of Google Lens, Google Goggles was the company’s first stab at creating an image recognition app for smartphones. No one used it. Ever. If anyone says otherwise they’re lying.
Google Hands Free (2016 – 2017)
Do you ever feel a slight pang of embarrassment as you reach for your expensive smartphone or watch to pay for a bag of chips with Google Pay instead of using a card or cold hard cash? Imagine that multiplied by a hundred and that’s Google Hands Free, a Bluetooth-enabled mobile payment system where you had to actually say “I’ll pay with Google” out loud to confirm a transaction.
Voice payments are a great idea in theory, but can we make the activation phrase a lot less cringey next time, please.
Google Plus (2011 – 2019)
Google’s long-awaited answer to Facebook, Google Plus (or Google+) launched in 2011, but never gained even a fraction of the latter’s popularity. The experience was just plain weird, with the final redesign turning the social site into something akin to a tile-based news feed. The final nail hammered into the Google Plus coffin stemmed from a serious need to overhaul the platform’s privacy and security components after a massive security hole was discovered. Of all of Google’s many social projects, Google Plus represents its most high-profile failure. The doomed social network will be erased from existence for good on April 2, 2019.
Opinion: Here lies Google Plus: Why it never scored (a lasting audience)
Google Lively (2008 – 2008)
Back when creepy virtual life simulators like Second Life and Habbo Hotel took the internet by storm, Google attempted to cash in on the hype with Lively — a virtual world sim with user-created avatars and virtual chat rooms. It lasted just five months.
Knol (2008 – 2012)
It’s deliciously ironic that the first search hit you get for Knol — Google’s answer to Wikipedia — is a Wikipedia entry about it written in the past tense.
Google Buzz (2010 – 2011)
Buzz was the search giant’s major attempt at social networking before Google Plus. Serving as a social component within Gmail, Buzz was a bit like Twitter, allowing users to post status updates, photos, videos, and links. Google retired the service just over a year after it launched due to privacy issues that cost Google a hefty $8.5 million lawsuit settlement. The crime? Using Gmail information for a social platform without asking users for permission. Oops.
That’s our list of failed Google products! Are there any projects we missed that you love(d)? Were you disappointed to see your favorite rank lower than expected? Be sure let us know in the comments below.
from Android Authority http://bit.ly/2SmsGXj
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