Another Personal Blog

Google: The weird company

If you are noticing my anger over google from the title of the post, then you are right. Yes, I am angry over Google for some of its weird decision which directly affected me on past and present. For a while I could say that google is company who makes good(superb in some case) products, gather a large user of those products and after a while they close those fantastic services with some WEIRD logic.

My recent anger is over the murder of MyTracks, an android app which lets you track the path you walk/cycle/drive around. MyTracks used to present nice statistics and trace path over google map. Google decided to discontinue it  on early 2016 and after 30th of March 2016 you will no-longer be able to use it.

Here goes the official statements from google

After April 30, 2016, My Tracks will no longer be available. We apologize for the inconvenience this might cause My Tracks users. We’ve made the tough decision to invest our efforts into other, more wide-reaching, mapping projects. Below are some resources to help you manage or export your data and find other apps to continue tracking your activities.

I was regular user of MyTracks and hence it affects me directly.I am looking for alternatives and testing few apps already on the play market. I will post my testing as soon as I found some usable and best match for it.

Ok let’s discuss about few other products the google discontinued.

  • My Tracks
Path Tracing app for android. I was regular user of it before google decided to kill.  I have used it from short cycling/hiking to long distance, multi-day cycling adventure. 🙂 With some cool feature like
    • Data Sync to Google Drive
    • Summary of the speed/elevation of whole path
    • Tracing of path covered over google map
    • Low battery use
  • Google Code
Google killed their code hosting service code.google.com since early 2015. They said it publicly that they are going to kill their code hosting service in favor of mainstream code hosting service like github, bitbucket etc. I had never used it to host my own code but being a coder, “This project has been moved to github” was one of the frequent message I happened to read after google’s decision.
  • Google Reader
It was nice RSS feed service from google.Google discontinued it while I was getting familiar with RSS news feeds and becoming regular user.  After this I searched for alternatives and found a nice solution greader.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *