I’m sure you’re right but this sounds like a dark joke from outside given how many people I know who stopped using Google products due to the kind of churn Apple avoids. A decade ago my friends & coworkers favored Google for messaging and payment but the iOS users also used iMessage and Apple Pay. Today we use those services even more but even the Android loyalists stopped following Google’s migrations about 5 years ago and we switched to Signal and Venmo for cross-platform use. Periodically we’ll speculate about whether there is yet a “next person to tell users they need to install a new app is fired” policy yet.
- you add 80% of what Apple does, every year[^1]
- every year, you put the same clique on this year's Apple project
- that clique is formed by overworking, without complaint, to work around a complete lack of interest in planning / conversation
- only interact with and reward that clique (after all, they're working on the priority project this year, and focus is good)
- rinse, lather, repeat, for 7 years.
You'll find:
- you have 20% of what Apple actually built (80% ^ 7 years)
- your new management layer punches down, because they've always had right of first refusal on any work
- your new management layer also has 0 interest in planning
- your new management layer believes any interest in planning is a form of aggression and/or whining ('thrive in ambiguity!')
- nothing gets done except this year's Apple project
- you don't have anyone to nurture and sustain quality
- any initiative to repair anything requires a new team adjacent to the actual team, a fresh start, and a rebrand
I wish Pixel enough longevity that it gets terraformed[^2].
[^1] I believe that's _very_ generous, my figure is 60%.
[^2] Orgs that aren't as public facing and broken go through an elongated, silent, process where the leads 2 levels up leave in a bunch, then steadily 80% of line management is replaced with people in dress shirts from Motorola/Qualcomm/Google Search, and about 50% of grunts churn. Over 2-3 years.
There was a collaboration (grant?) with Ross Anderson's team in Cambridge on secure NFC payments. Android supported those in 2013, but, of course, carriers had control of the secure element, so everything got derailed, to the point that Google tried desperate workarounds such as HCE, without luck. As we have all seen, tap to pay was actually invented by Apple in 2014.
So, yeah, things were even crazier and more complicated than you recall, but it wasn't always the case that people were copying Apple.
You're right, it wasn't just a Google credit card, I was referring specifically to this[^1], in 2020: Apple Card was announced as 'Apple is your bank'. (the article in my previous comment is the sunsetting of this rumor)
[^1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/17/21225276/google-apple-car...
The first culprit that comes to mind is swipe to the camera on the lockscreen - useful, but not Apple enough, so they delete it. Then, Apple ships it, but Google already deleted it.
Now, among other things, every time I need to open the app, I inevitably search for Google Pay instead of Wallet.
Maybe I'll remember now that this happened.
Android Pay -> Google Pay seemed fair, but IIRC, Google Pay -> Google Wallet was just a combo of shipping-the-org-chart and Apple me-too'ing.
At the time, they were also leaking that there was going to be a Google credit card / true bank account launched, because Apple had just done that. [^1]
There was no greater force internally than Apple. I swear the only thing 90% of leads _actually_ wanted to get done was something close enough to last year's Apple announcements that they could say it with a straight face.
[^1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-is-scrapping-its-plan-to...