100%. Every product not a part of the core mission is attack surface area, ongoing maintenance to ensure it works with the rest of Google services and infra, and drag on the rest of the team and velocity.

The part that sucks for consumers is that they often kill things that people like. I wish they had a better way of doing this.

Bravo to brutecat for this excellent discovery, productionization, and writeup.

They could spin these products off into separate companies and cut the integration with the rest of the Google ecosystem.

Where is the profit for the individual product? There are a lot of services at every BigTech company that would not make sense as an individual product. But they make the overall ecosystem better or make money only because they are a part of the larger company.

That’s part of the stupidity of the DOJ trying to force Google to sell Chrome. Who would want it? And how would they profit from it?

> That’s part of the stupidity of the DOJ trying to force Google to sell Chrome. Who would want it? And how would they profit from it?

All valid questions, but it might be that splitting the tool used to bludgeon everyone around is still worth it, even if pace of development slows down considerably.

There will be no development. Who is going to spend money to develop it and why would they? Microsoft even decided it wasn’t worth it to develop their own engine.

Unless you are using Chromebooks, every desktop user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download it.

> There will be no development.

My point is that maybe it is okay? Runaway churn is at least partially responsible for current situation, where most companies simply unable to compete.

What companies are trying to “compete” in the browser space?

Apple has no reason to compete, it can just make more and more functionality for native apps as can Google if it doesn’t have to worry about Chrome anymore.

Microsoft doesn’t care about the browser anymore and just uses Chromium. Firefox’s revenue comes completely from Google. If Google doesn’t have to prop up Firefox for antitrust reasons anymore, why would they?

The firefox admin are making millions of dollars per year even if they make one bad decision after another (mostly focusing on acqusitions and new projects instead of actual work on their core product: firefox).

Probably way too much effort. The apps aren't built for generic infra, but rather Google's internal weirdware. It wouldn't be possible to run it anywhere else without a rewrite.

I agree, and I like this term "internal weirdware". Real question: Why don't we see more start-ups try to clone old terminated Google services with a freemium model?

People don’t want to pay for things.

I want. And I do. Notable examples are Kagi.com and Raindrop.io. I've also been sponsoring a number of projects for a number of months, from journalism to social media startup.

But I am getting more hesitant as often when I (and others) do it seems companies think they can increase their prices wildly or do other stuff.

I have this exact feeling now with Logseq: I started paying for sync a while ago and it seems so did others and now they are rewriting the whole thing from plain text[1] to some kind of database based storage :-/

[1]: which could be synced over git, transferred effortlessly into another application and was one of the reasons I went with Logseq

How many of those companies are profitable? How many do you think you will see a blog post about in a year or two - “Our Amazing Journey” where they won’t either go out of business or get acquired and their product gets shut down”?

From Kagi’s website

https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#:~:te...

We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month.

Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs.

That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).

Wrong blog post, try this one ;)

https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi

So what do you know about kagi’s profitability :).

I’m honestly glad to hear that. Until I heard your interview with Gruber, I thought Kagi was the same company that use to provide a payment platform for Mac indie developers.

It’s always good to see a bootstrapped company become successful without enshittification. I put you up there with BackBlaze.

I see you have investors now (not saying that is a negative). Are the laws still the same about having to be a “qualified investor”? Can anyone invest - asking out of curiosity.

For the particular type of investment we were doing (angel list roll up vehicle with basically our users) one needs to verify they are an accredited investor.

There probably are. The real question is why are they not successful. Maybe they need to solve distribution. I use Google Calendar tasks for todos because it is there, handy, for example.

As sister comments have said there is no money in it. They are stickiness plays or just bets for Google.

Maybe Apple should do the same and kill their many half-baked software products.

Which ones? In my experience, a lot of Apples products have incredible longevity. Notes, Calendar, Pages all just get better and better.

Alarms, Photos, Siri, Books..

How are any of these half baked? (Aside from obvious Siri deficiencies)

Alarms is unreliable for the basic functionality of waking you up.

Photos redesign makes it really hard to use.

Siri works half of the times, maybe even less than that.

Books lacks of basic functionalities such as downloading and keeping books on device.

How are alarms unreliable?

Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked. All of the functionality is there and there’s a new consistency in how it works that wasn’t there previously.

Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.

> How are alarms unreliable?

A simple google search will answer this question

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24340238/apple-iphone-alar...

Even an hn search is fine, if you do not trust the Verge (notice these are comments from the last 3 months so not an old issue):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962418

> Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.

Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.

> Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked.

Perfect, then keep Photos and kill only alarms, books and Siri.

I’ve never had my alarm fail, but it looks like others have hit this bug. So by your definition if a product has a bug (even if rare but intrinsic to the functionality), then it’s half baked. Given (effectively) all software has bugs, then by your definition there are no fully baked software products. I think we have very different definitions of what makes a product half or fully baked.

I haven’t used Books extensively outside of audiobooks. So it sounds like there’s offloading of caching going on that’s iCloud wide; disabling iCloud sync would fix this. I can imagine that being frustrating if the book you want isn’t there when you’re on a flight (which should only happen if you haven’t recently accessed it). I agree there should be a way to prevent this. I wouldn’t call that half baked, but it’s a big enough problem I’d agree that’s not fully thought through (or more likely, they did think through it but came to a different conclusion).

> Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.

Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded. There is a setting to automatically remove downloads once you're finished with the book, but that defaults to off (and I didn't even realize it was there until I went looking just now).

>Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded.

This is objectively false. I suggest you do a simple google search or read my other comment.

I read your other comment. It looks like you're talking about iCloud Storage there. Books downloaded from the Apple Books Store do not go into iCloud Storage. Books you've uploaded are stored in iCloud.

I just checked my phone, I have 169 books downloaded. This includes many books I haven't looked at for years and years. This includes many books that I bought 3, 4, 5 iPhones ago and are still present, copied from device to device, because Books does not remove store downloads unless asked to.

Probably a few times every quarter I have iOS alarms that didn't go off for some reason on my iPhone.

It's happened for years: it was pretty bad about 5/6 years ago, but Apple claimed they fixed it, but it's still happening a bit.

In fact, when I really need to wake up at a particular time (say for a flight), I set two alarms 1 minutes apart.

Seems like there is more to this. I have been using iPhones since they came out and can't think of a time my alarm never worked, and I use them multiple times a day.

They are not. I haven't seen an unreliable alarm since the digital age. 1980s LED alarm clocks were reliable.

What are you talking about? I’ve got the books app open now, I can see all of my downloaded books. In fact there’s a whole section in the library for my downloaded books!

Go to library > collections > downloaded.

I can see books I purchased and other PDFs that I uploaded.

I do agree on the Photos redesign. I feel like I constantly get stuck on certain pages.

> What are you talking about?

Your tone is aggressive and uncalled for. In fact, the fact that you have never found a very common bug says a lot about your inattention to detail.

There's no "keep forever on device" button, which to me seems like a basic functionality. If the app decides to delete them, it will.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1b04rzy/apple_what_wer...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23736536

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/344271/books-autom...

Oh okay, but that’s not what you said? You implied that no books could be downloaded at all which is just not true.

iCloud offload is a pretty common feature on Apple devices and one that I find pretty handy. I understand why it doesn’t work for others though.

You can turn off iCloud sync in general for the device.

I don't think I have implied that. I have said that there's no functionality to download and keep files on device, which is true, because you cannot trust the device will not delete your files without your permission (or even without warning you first). But I'm not a native speaker so I could have been misunderstood.

There's a lot of truth to that. Older projects often get bogged down by new security & compliance horizontals, to the point where maintenance is just no longer worth it.