I was locked out of my account for a month and been in “customer support hell” with them. It was a nightmare, I would tell them it’s not allowing me to log in because it claims ALL my devices are suspicious and blocks access, and they would reply with a bot-generated E-mail saying I should try going into my account and changing settings. I would reply saying “You moron, I can’t access the settings, I can’t log in” and they would reply with the same message again.

I don’t understand how such a large company can have such abysmal customer support. I’ve had my account for maybe over 15 years now and they couldn’t care less. In the end I fixed it by having a friend log in for me, but it was a wake-up call of how dependent I was on my email and how many services I used to login via Google. I would advise people not to be too attached to their account.

I’m doing the same but for more reasons than that. I’m honestly just sick of them. And Apple and Microsoft, to be fair. I’m tired of them all and the last decade of increasingly mounting bullshit. I genuinely want to support smaller businesses and help build up alternatives, and I’m tired of feeling bound to the big boys and forced to swallow whatever garbage they’ll push next.

Google’s shit just isn’t notably better than anyone else’s at this point, either. Not in most cases. Maps is still king and likely will be for a long time, but other than that? Meh. Email is email, haven’t lost anything by moving to Tutanota. Dropping Google Drive was easy when they killed the proper functionality of the desktop sync app a few years ago. Google Play Music got murdered and the only reason I kept that subscription was for YouTube, but the price increase next month is making me drop that too.

The real bitch is Android. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to use it without Google Play Services.

My Google Pixel 5a died recently. To their credit, Google did extend the warranty on the 5a (probably would have been sued otherwise because these devices are dropping dead every day), but attempting to actually claim warranty was the most bizarre Kafkaesque process.

Ultimately it took me 6 weeks and at least 10 follow-ups with Google. They would forget things (like how to get information from their partner uBreakiFix) and would need me to do the legwork for them. Every time I called them I got the following impression:

1. Customer service agents at Google have NO power to do ANYTHING but read a script and follow policy. I know this is a common complaint with big companies, but I’ve been on this earth awhile and dealt with a lot of companies, and it honestly shocked me how little power the agents at Google had to actually help. Never seen anything like it before.

2. The agents similarly have no access to any information that might help you. In my case, once my RMA was delayed, every time I would call they would basically “check” on it, and the answer was basically: “well the replacement should have shipped by now, and I have no idea why it didn’t, so I’m just going to add another 5 business days to the last estimate we gave you”. No one was ever able to figure out the reason for the delay.

I was getting ready to file in small claims court against Google since it looked like they had no intention of honoring their warranty, but decided to give the old “get support via Tweet” method, which did actually get results. The funny thing was that Google scolded me for providing my RMA number via Twitter DMs since it’s “private information” and I should have given them a case number that agents were supposed to provide me, but never did.

The social media escalation team did manage to get Google to overnight me a replacement after I reached out. However, after this experience (as you say, unhuman), I see no moral issue with stuff like blocking ads on YouTube. I think Google have fully shown their cards, at least to me, that they don’t really care about service.

I realize they can’t run something like YouTube like a small community website, for example, and that they do have to make money as a business. I kind of get where some of their recent actions come from. But I feel similarly to how I feel about media companies whose content I pirate. It’s really not my problem, and not my job to help them figure out how to compete with piracy. Valve got shit figured out with Steam, and I’ve spent hundreds of dollars buying games on there. Media companies seemed like they had things figured out at one point with Netflix, but it wasn’t sustainable, plus they got way too greedy. Google used to have their shit together, but they are being too heavy handed and anti consumer now.

In my position now I have at least some influence on the products that my company uses, and I would never recommend that we buy anything from Google if we can help it since the risk of being stonewalled by their support seems so high, and I’ve experienced that personally. In my personal life, I have a goal to get off of Google’s services when I can, and pull all my data out. I don’t ever want to be in a position again where I’m thinking of suing a company, but worried that they’ll use my data and my reliance on their services as leverage against me the way Google can.

My wife bought a new Pixel 8 recently from Google Fi. They sent a Pixel 6a for some reason. She attempted to work with their incompetent, powerless, disconnected and foreign support for a week to get something to happen, desperately reaching out every day for someone to just tell her what was happening. Then, she just purchased a new one because you can’t go longer than that without a phone.

Then it was 2 more weeks of them failing to issue a refund for the original wrong phone, trying to ship another phone that she no longer needed, and simultaneously trying to bill her a penalty for not yet activating the phone that was originally shipped.

All it would take is one person who had information, authority, and a modicum of understanding. Nope. That is not a thing that can be achieved through any level of escalation at Google anymore.

Nokia had the same problem recently during a recent issue. They have intentionally made it impossible to solve issues. This is what some companies want. Don’t buy from them.

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The only two Google services I still use are YouTube and Google Maps.

I use Google Maps as a local guide of sorts, because restaurant information (and information on other places) is often better compared to Apple Maps and other services. I didn’t use it for navigation for years and the app is a bloated mess nowadays.

Nextcloud by a mile. That’s where the primary devs from Owncloud went, consequently all new work has been done there. As well, Owncloud got sold to some shitbird corporate suite just recently, it’ll be dead in a year.

Use the AIO docker image, preferably on a VM docker host you can snapshot.

How about Syncthing?

Don’t be evil