I spent years investing into Google's ecosystem — and now I'm regretting it

For a long time, it’s been hard for me to imagine life without Google. From Search and Gmail to Nest speakers and Pixel phones, the company’s ecosystem of software and hardware has expanded over the years to be able to fill nearly every consumer tech need — and for myself and a lot of other Android users, it’s done exactly that. Since becoming so deeply ingrained in my routines, though, Google has changed a lot.

Google Search is more AI-oriented than ever, with the capability to generate bespoke “mini apps” to complete tasks and send automated agents off to browse and monitor the internet on your behalf. Android 17’s hallmark upgrade is a suite of AI features baked into the OS. Google Photos wants to catalog the clothes you wear. Gmail doesn’t offer as much no-strings-attached storage as it once did, but now it can read and write emails for you. The entire Google ecosystem has shifted radically in the span of just a few years, and all that change is making me wish I wasn’t so invested.

I used to like it here

Not that long ago, falling into an all-Google tech diet wasn’t just easy, but appealing. To google has been synonymous with finding info online since before my family bought its first PC in the late ’90s; I signed up for Gmail in high school, and Drive and Docs were essential parts of my college career. Google Photos hit the scene as smartphone cameras were making great leaps, and coincidentally, just as I started taking an interest in photography in my 20s. These services were all best-in-class, and crucially, free to start. For more than a few years, I wasn’t just a Google user — I was a genuine fan.

My headlong slide into Google’s products and services isn’t an unusual experience. A few years ago, my colleague Rita El Khoury described the tail end of a similar arc:

In a blog post announcing Google Search’s latest AI updates, Google VP of Search Elizabeth Reid wrote that the goal of Search has always been “to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex, or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate.” That’s visibly been Search’s goal for the past few years, of course. But up until Gemini hit the scene, I always thought of Search more as a directory of sources of information than a place to ask complex questions.

The idea to pivot from pointing users toward outside information to automatically finding, summarizing, and presenting information right in the Search interface might make sense from a UX perspective, but as it stands, it just doesn’t work all that well. Years into the Gemini era, Google’s AI still gets tripped up by even simple queries, and anyone who’s tried to use AI Mode to find answers to hyper-specific questions will know that it routinely misconstrues or conflates information it’s scraped, presenting its confused understanding with matter-of-fact confidence.

Search is relatively easy to move away from, as Google services go, despite being baked into my phone’s operating system and the browser that holds my history, bookmarks, passwords, and payment information. For me, Photos is Google’s stickiest service. I’ve been using it since the beginning, and while it’s still good at the main thing I’ve always liked about it — it makes it easy to back up all my photos and access them from anywhere — recent updates have filled the app with features I don’t use.

Google Photos’ editing interface was reworked last year, pushing simple manual editing tools further into the UI to prominently feature text-based generative AI editing. The app can use AI to make stickers out of objects in photos, and it promotes that capability with an annoying shimmering effect that appears when viewing photos in full screen. These changes have degraded my photo viewing and editing experience — two key components of any gallery app.

This week, Google’s rolling out a new feature in Photos that uses AI to make a catalog of all the clothes you’ve worn in images you’ve uploaded to the service, with the option to generate outfits by mixing and matching different articles it’s identified. Five years ago, a niche and novel feature like a digital wardrobe manager might have been a fun Area 120 experiment. But today, because promoting AI-enabled features is a top priority, it lives in Android’s default photo gallery app, accessible from the same cluttered screen where you go to see your screenshots and downloaded images.

I could leave Photos, too; Google’s not holding my images hostage. But over the past decade, I’ve come to rely on it to manage and interact with my ever-expanding collection of photos. I’ve got shared albums with family and friends; I use the app to control the Photo Frame feature on the aging Nest Hub Max in my kitchen. Replacing the service Photos has provided would be tough, to say nothing of the task of actually exporting years of images and reorganizing them somewhere else.

Going where the wind blows

Google managed to make itself indispensable to a large part of the world’s population over the course of decades, launching products and services that fill a wide variety of needs and are made to work well together. I’ve entrusted a lot of my digital life to Google, and the speed and scale at which it’s reorganized itself to align with the modern tech economy’s AI-forward mandate is more than a little alarming. Regular users didn’t have any say in the shift, and I think it’s safe to say a lot of us haven’t enjoyed it.

I share all the standard concerns about industrialized AI, but I’m not really making a case against AI itself here; there must be plenty of Google users who are happy with how the past few years have unfolded. Still, it seems obvious that Google’s trajectory in the AI era has been a reactive one, geared toward capturing a portion of the frenzied investment the AI sector has seen since ChatGPT launched three and a half years ago: just this week, parent company Alphabet announced the sale of $80 billion in stock that’s meant to “fund investments in its world-class AI compute infrastructure.”

With AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic working toward potential trillion-dollar IPOs, many observers worry that the current investment activity surrounding AI products and services is unsustainable. A potential bursting of the AI bubble would be gnarly for lots of reasons, but it’d also surely see Google change tack again, pivoting away from high-investment, low-return AI services to whatever the next big thing is.

Having my online life tied up in the services of a company that’s changed its entire identity over the course of a few years to suit market trends, and may well have to do so again in the near future, doesn’t feel great. What will Search and Photos be like five years from now? If and when AI investment dries up, what will Google’s next company-wide pivot be?

There was a time when entrusting so much of my data, time, and attention to a single corporation seemed convenient, but lately, it’s felt like it’s been a years-long mistake. Moving away from Search, Gmail, Photos, Drive, and more all at once would be a pain in the ass that I don’t have the time or energy for right now, but my Google experience in the AI era has just about soured me on integrated tech ecosystems altogether.