GoKawiilC. Scott Brown / Android Authority
For a long time, it’s been hard for me to imagine life without Google. From Search and Gmail to Nest speakers and Pixel phones, the company’s ecosystem of software and hardware has expanded over the years to be able to fill nearly every consumer tech need — and for myself and a lot of other Android users, it’s done exactly that. Since becoming so deeply ingrained in my routines, though, Google has changed a lot.
Google Search is more AI-oriented than ever, with the capability to generate bespoke “mini apps” to complete tasks and send automated agents off to browse and monitor the internet on your behalf. Android 17’s hallmark upgrade is a suite of AI features baked into the OS. Google Photos wants to catalog the clothes you wear. Gmail doesn’t offer as much no-strings-attached storage as it once did, but now it can read and write emails for you. The entire Google ecosystem has shifted radically in the span of just a few years, and all that change is making me wish I wasn’t so invested.
How has your Google ecosystem experience changed since 2023? 42 votes My overall Google experience has gotten better. 33 % My overall Google experience has gotten worse. 38 % My overall Google experience has not changed. 29 %
I used to like it here
Shimul Sood / Android Authority
Not that long ago, falling into an all-Google tech diet wasn’t just easy, but appealing. To google has been synonymous with finding info online since before my family bought its first PC in the late ’90s; I signed up for Gmail in high school, and Drive and Docs were essential parts of my college career. Google Photos hit the scene as smartphone cameras were making great leaps, and coincidentally, just as I started taking an interest in photography in my 20s. These services were all best-in-class, and crucially, free to start. For more than a few years, I wasn’t just a Google user — I was a genuine fan.
My headlong slide into Google’s products and services isn’t an unusual experience. A few years ago, my colleague Rita El Khoury described the tail end of a similar arc: Suddenly, there’s a Google smart speaker in my home. Google Maps knows every step I’ve taken in the last decade, and there’s photographic proof of that and all the people I know in Photos. Chrome knows my passwords, credit cards, and my entire browsing history, Google acquired my 10-year heart rate data and sleep patterns from Fitbit, and I still somehow trust it with the phone number of every person I know. Like Rita, a bunch of my data is tied up in Google. From my ancient Gmail address that’s linked to nearly every online account I have to the some 25,000 images I have stored and organized in Google Photos, my ties to the ecosystem are deep. I let Google become the infrastructure of my online life during a time when the company’s priorities were different, and now that Google has pivoted to all AI, all the time, I’m pretty well stuck in a bunch of services that are evolving in ways that don’t benefit me at all.
In a blog post announcing Google Search’s latest AI updates, Google VP of Search Elizabeth Reid wrote that the goal of Search has always been “to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex, or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate.” That’s visibly been Search’s goal for the past few years, of course. But up until Gemini hit the scene, I always thought of Search more as a directory of sources of information than a place to ask complex questions.
Taylor Kerns / Android Authority
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