At this point, Google is infamous for quickly and prematurely killing beloved projects and products. The highest profile loss right at the beginning of the year was certainly Stadia, the company’s game streaming service that launched just in 2019. After not gaining as much momentum as the company likely hoped it would, it quickly decided to reduce spending and ultimately shut it down. But Stadia is not the only product killed in 2023, and withGoogle Podcasts officially on the way out, we already know what’s coming in 2024. There are more than a dozen products big and small, and we’ve got a collection of all of them right here for you.
Starting December: Inactive Google accounts
Ever since Google first started offering accounts, there was one thing you could count on: as long as you didn’t use it for anything illegal, your account would just live on forever, even if you don’t use it. Starting in December 2023, that’s not the case anymore. Google announced thatit would start deleting old and inactive accountsfrom that month onwards. The company will first begin with accounts that have never been used and then turn to those that haven’t been used for two years.
There will be multiple warnings, and there are plenty of exceptions to this rule right now, though we wouldn’t be surprised if they are tightened over time. Business and education accounts are exempt, and if you’ve ever uploaded a YouTube video with the account in question, it will also not be deleted right now. Technically, this is not a product shutdown, but you could rely on Google retaining inactive accounts indefinitely from when Google started offering Gmail accounts in 2004, which you now no longer can.
October 22: Photo Spheres
Back when Google just started Street View, it relied on the community to add more images from places that its signature cars haven’t been to yet. To make the experience as immersive as possible, the company added an option to create Photo Spheres, which allowed you to take 360-degree panoramas with your phone’s camera.
Ever since Google killed the standalone Street View app earlier in 2023 (see further below), the only way to create Photo Spheres was the Google Camera app, which is exclusive to Pixel phones. With the release of the Pixel 8 and the new Camera version 9.1 pre-installed on it, the option to create Photo Sphereswas removed from the app altogether. As such, the innovative camera feature died a slow death, with it becoming less and less accessible before disappearing altogether.
September 7: Google Domains
As arguably the biggest internet company out there, it would make sense for Google to own all sorts of verticals on the web, including a domain registry. That was the case from 2014 with Google Domains — at least until its abrupt shutdown in September 2023.
Google Domains is one of the rare shutdowns that affects businesses, which may have relied on the service much more than personal users. While the abrupt death of the service is annoying, Google is at least providing a simple migration path to Squarespace,which acquired its domain business. Those who purchased their domains on Google Domains are automatically switched to Squarespace. It’s definitely an annoying change for those who wanted to manage all parts of their business through Google Workspace, which now doesn’t include domains anymore.
August 29: Pixel Pass
Customers were given $100 in credit towards a new Pixel phone on the Google Store, which isn’t the deal they signed up for, but it’s something. Meanwhile, Apple’s similariPhone Upgrade Programis alive and well, launched all the way back in 2016.
August 8: Google Currents
You may not have heard of Google Currents, but the company introduced it in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus — for businesses, that is. The service was meant as a social network for individual workspaces, but it looks like it never really took off in the past four years. Currentswas shut down on July 5, with an option to export data until August 8. Google is encouraging businesses who actually used the service to use Chat Spaces instead, which is a Slack competitor part of Google Workspace.
July 19: Album Archive
Hangouts has long been killed, but there were a few remnants of the once-rising chat service still around until 2023. Album Archive was a little known and hidden service that served as a vault for images and videos you shared via Hangouts, but in July 2023,Google decided to shut down this service, too. Those who were lucky enough to take a look and export their data before it was too late could use the opportunity to take a stroll in memory lane.
June 26: YouTube Stories
YouTube Stories was one of those things that was obviously heavily inspired by Snapchat and the Story format it invented. While other competitors like Instagram successfully copied and monetized Snapchat’s idea, YouTube wasn’t as lucky. After leaving Stories barely alive for six years, Google finally decided tomercy-kill the service in June 2023, instead promoting its Shorts much more heavily.
June 15: Grasshopper
If you want to learn how to code, Google used to help you get started with Grasshopper. The Duolingo-style service made it easy to dive into the basics of computer programming in a fun and rewarding way, even if it may never have reached the same level of popularity as competitors. It’s still sad thatthe company decided to shut down Grasshopper in June 2023; there is one less path to take for aspiring app developers.
June 13: Assistant Conversational Actions
It’s clear that AI, Bard, and Gemini are Google’s new favorite childs in 2023. Assistant is increasingly taking the back seat, and has lost a few features throughout the past months. One of the biggest hits is arguablythe death of Conversational Actions, which is replaced by App Actions with Android. Despite a one-year grace period, many services never made the switch to the new alternative, though, and simply stopped working. Since App Actionswith Androidonly works on Android (as the name implies), many developers likely decided to just discontinue support altogether rather than only relying on only one platform that excludes, among others, Google’s own smart home devices.
Another feature to bite the dust at roughly the same time wassupport for third-party notes and lists on Assistant. With Conversational Actions out as a replacement, services like Bring, AnyDo, and more can no longer be controlled with Google Assistant at all.
April 24: Project Jacquard
Project Jacquard was an interesting idea that was meant to make your clothes smart. The technology was integrated into different fabric-based products like backpacks from Samsonite and a few jackets from Levi’s after it was first shown off alongside the Soli radar launch for the Pixel 4. Just like Soli, which was discontinued after just one Pixel generation, it looks like Google didn’t see a future in this project. Without many notable product launches, Google unceremoniouslydiscontinued the app that controls the smart clothesin April 2023.
March 21: Google Street View app
Given that Street View imagery is readily available in Maps, with Google relying on the help from volunteers less and less, it was no wonder that it was time for the companyto shut down the Street View app in 2023. The app allowed you to take your own Street View-like 360-degree view images, among other things.
January 18: Google Stadia
Oh, Stadia. We hardly knew ye. Google’s ill-fated game streaming service that was announced with much fanfare in 2019 didn’t even make it to its fourth official birthday, being shut down in January 2023. We wrote at length about the game streaming service that was too good for this world and that Google stopped being interested in as soon as it launched, sostroll down the memory lane with us.
January 11: Google OnHub
Google’s current Nest Wifi lineup of routers is capable and easily manageable through the Google Home app. But before then, the company already worked together with other manufacturers to create its OnHub mesh routers, and the companydecided to kill them right at the beginning of the year. Rather than just ceasing software support and having them keep functioning, Google made it impossible to manage the routers or change settings on January 11. If you had a mesh network with OnHub routers and Wifi routers, you even had to factory reset the OnHub and set up your network anew to keep everything else running fine.
In our review back in 2015,we called the OnHub"a $200 bet on the future." Those who bought it eight years ago likely got their money’s worth, but anyone who jumped on board much later may not have expected their router to stop working that soon.
Google Podcasts is up next
Just because the year is coming to an end, it doesn’t mean that Google isn’t already thinking about what to kill in the future. The company announced that it will shut down its standalone Google Podcasts app, moving the audio format into YouTube Music instead. If that seems familiar, it’s because it is. YouTube Music’s predecessor Google Play Music used to be a podcast player, too, until it was shut down itself in favor of the YouTube service and Google Podcasts.
If you want to learn about even more products that Google killed over the years, we can only recommend you take a look at Google’s graveyard over at the excellently curatedKilled By Google website.
