Roses are red, violets are blue,
Why devs hate Google, and so should you?

Google ☠️ The cloud

Google Drive vs their own API: Many of us developers, go out of our way to support Google Drive in our apps, programs and websites, to make things easier for users, but over the years, Google keeps making it harder and in some cases demanding “solutions”, that conveniently involve us paying their partners:
$Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
$End of the road for Google Drive and Transmit

Google ☠️ The Internet

Google OAuth vs the Canidae browser: Users interested in testing my CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) browser, back when the project still existed, were prohibited from passing Google OAuth in my and any other CEF browser, unless they changed their user agent string. I managed to contact Google and was told this was a necessary protection against bad actors. As we all know, no bad actor would ever add two lines of code, to change the user agent of their malware.

Google vs the point of SSL: Google Chrome presents all sites access over HTTPS as secure and all sites accessed over HTTP as dangerous. This is very misleading to less educated Internet users, falling for “secure” phishing sites with SSL certificates and avoiding “dangerous” static webpages, that never needed one.

Google ☠️ Android apps

Googles friends vs FOSS
developers: X and other big social media platforms running their own servers, are allowed to host seemingly any user generated content, while Google forces us, developers helping to maintain XMPP clients for Android, to exclude features, that allow our users to discover chatrooms, that anyone can host on their servers. We are thus not only held responsible for what we publish, what we host, but also for the whole XMPP network. I offer my version of the client, unrestricted, on my website, others choose their repo or F-droid.

@thecanine@twtxt.net ahh, Google, what can I say?! It is amazing for me to think I used to have everything on Google, and now I have nothing. I mean, I have kept my Gmail, and Google Voice. The first I don’t use, but I have it since beta (was of the few first to be invited to it), so it has a “sentimental” value. The second is my catch-all-spam number.

@thecanine@twtxt.net this is really fucked up! Do you have other examples? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net There are many other examples, centered around how the “enshitification” of their services, negatively impacts everyone: G-Mail randomly blacklisting small e-mail servers, resulting in e-mails ending in some Google void they can’t be retrieved out of (unlike the spam folder); their proprietary Android phone app, mislabelling phone numbers of legitimate businesses, as spam calls and warning people not to pick up; their incompetence in SEO filtering, enabling AI generated adware websites, to be shown above legitimate results.