Billions of people around the world use Google’s products every day, and they count on those products to work reliably
Really? The only thing that still feels reliable to me is search. Maps was kind of reliable but recently shops have disappeared randomly, and wayfinding works very strange (well I’m in Japan, but it’s still Google). For every other product, I’ve long since given up on relying on them. Heck, for most products I would even assume they cease to exist within the next couple of years.
Think of what a mom in India or a dad in Indonesia use: search, youtube, gmail, photos, drive. These Google products have worked wonders for the majority of cases.
I gave up on both Apple and Google for both contacts, photos, and calendars. They keep getting missynchronized every time they updated the OS I had problems. Then I started self-hosting. So long as I back stuff up my calendar just works. My contacts don’t get duplicated, they don’t get mined, and my photos don’t get illegally scanned guilty until proof and innocent. And they don’t decide to kill my product at the last minute whenever I’m using it. So I do use Google for a few things, they’re maps wild. Annoying. Still is the best thing here in the states. I do find the distractions on the screen. Most annoying. As for the SRE, that’s just a sysdmin with a new name.
Not op but I use Nextcloud for calendar/contacts sync (and I ignore the file hosting/sharing part of it). I use Nextcloud because it has OpenID support so it fits into my self-hosted unified login system.
My calendaring is called radicale. I have it fronted with a reverse proxy called caddy, and I protect it from brute forcing with log monitoring the checks for invalid logins.
Really? The only thing that still feels reliable to me is search. Maps was kind of reliable but recently shops have disappeared randomly, and wayfinding works very strange (well I’m in Japan, but it’s still Google). For every other product, I’ve long since given up on relying on them. Heck, for most products I would even assume they cease to exist within the next couple of years.
Think of what a mom in India or a dad in Indonesia use: search, youtube, gmail, photos, drive. These Google products have worked wonders for the majority of cases.
Thanks to the GenAI search results, I wouldn’t even call Search reliable.
I suspect data integrity and systems uptime are treated separately at google.
Gmail is extremely commonly used I think. Interestingly, I never use Google for search. I find it to be pretty bad.
Right. I don’t use Gmail so can’t judge that.
maps navigation is fine in toronto but i don’t drive
I gave up on both Apple and Google for both contacts, photos, and calendars. They keep getting missynchronized every time they updated the OS I had problems. Then I started self-hosting. So long as I back stuff up my calendar just works. My contacts don’t get duplicated, they don’t get mined, and my photos don’t get illegally scanned guilty until proof and innocent. And they don’t decide to kill my product at the last minute whenever I’m using it. So I do use Google for a few things, they’re maps wild. Annoying. Still is the best thing here in the states. I do find the distractions on the screen. Most annoying. As for the SRE, that’s just a sysdmin with a new name.
Can I ask about your stack for contacts and calendars?
Not op but I use Nextcloud for calendar/contacts sync (and I ignore the file hosting/sharing part of it). I use Nextcloud because it has OpenID support so it fits into my self-hosted unified login system.
What do you use for your self-hosted OpenID? I’m thinking about trying Dex in front of a GLAuth, so i’m interested in what others are doing…
Keycloak, unfortunately.
My calendaring is called radicale. I have it fronted with a reverse proxy called caddy, and I protect it from brute forcing with log monitoring the checks for invalid logins.