Did you know that out of 4.39B individuals using the internet in 2020, 4 billion are Google users? That’s a whole 91%!
Whether you use Google products on your Android phone, in your office, or really just use YouTube, product updates will most likely affect your experience, and as the user’s needs and opportunities change every single day, companies are only left with the choice to adapt their products to the user’s needs with constant updates.
Companies make so many updates to their products as they go that you may not even notice something has changed until it’s huge.
Google made drastic updates to three of its products, Google Music, Google Travel, and Google Photos that will forever change your experience with all three of them.
Here they are:
1.Bye-bye, Google Music!
Google is shutting down Google Music starting September 2020 where the service will stop working gradually before officially shutting off forever in December 2020.
It is said that Google Music is being shut down to make more room for YouTube Music, which makes sense because if you visit the Google Music website, it encourages you to transfer your data to YouTube Music and use it instead while they make constant enhancements to the service to welcome users.
2. Google Travel is now COVID-19 updated:
While we all expected the pandemic wouldn’t last this long, it did, and we have to cope, and that also applies to companies as well as their services.
Google Travel added to its various features COVID-19 updates that’ll help you with your travels wherever you’re planning to go by informing you of the percentage of available hotels and flights for booking in addition to several resources and safety updates that can help you stay safe as you travel.
3. Google Photos, our favorite media storage platform, is no longer free:
The most infamous update of them all. This update has actually resulted in a lot of rage online because of how shocking it was.
Starting June 2021, Google Photos will no longer be a free service, but rather you have to subscribe to Google One. Such change applies only to new media, your old media will not be affected.
This type of update is not exclusive to Google Photos; word on the street is that they’re implementing similar changes to the other data storage products they have, such as Google Docs.
The good news is that you can purchase a subscription of 100GBs for Photos, Drive, and Gmail for a fairly cheap price: 1.99$/month or 14.99EGP/month, which is not that bad of a price point.
It seems like Google has been busy in 2020: changing the icons for most of its products, new product releases, and important updates.
Between a product shutdown, a pandemic update, and the end of a free era, we can say that the Google team has had to make some pretty tough decisions lately.
