Seen this story play out so many times. I audited a company years ago that claimed to have excellent, personal almost, relationship with Google and all needed paperwork to use their platform as a core of their business. They went bust 6 months after because of "unexpected" change of Google's product strategy.
Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.
If you're depending on the continued existence of any Google product beyond GMail, Google Cloud and advertising you should really consider fallback positions. The existence of Youtube is also guaranteed, but the existence of any particular API or service that you might depend on? Not so much. Hell they'd probably consider killing GMail if they didn't need the accounts to tie advertising impressions to individuals.
That's a ton of money, (and I've heard that they paid Apple even more last year) but it's kind of understandable. Apple customers don't usually have android phones snitching on them, are less likely to use chrome, and tend to have their devices and data in the Apple ecosystem. Google has fewer ways to spy on Apple user's lives and push ads at them. Search, gmail, and youtube probably give them the best opportunities. I wouldn't doubt that Apple users are getting as frustrated with Google's search engine as everyone else is though.
Google used to need Search in order to learn about the intimate details of our lives. It's how they knew what we were interested in, what our medical problems were, what we were learning, and what we were thinking about.
Now they have chrome giving google people's entire browsing history, android devices collecting realtime data on what people are doing offline, where they are and who they are with. Google also has products like fitbit, nest, and gmail that gather still more data for google. Google doesn't need Search to spy on us anymore, so they haven't invested in keeping it useful.
In fact, it's better for google if you can't find what you want and have to make multiple searches for information because it gives them more chances to throw ads at you, and the harder it is for people to find websites using Search the more sites might feel like they have no choice but to pay Google to keep them at the top of the search results.
People who find Search increasingly useless though are turning to alternatives and for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product as the first thing they turn to.
I would not count on Search staying around forever.
They need search for different reasons: it's their biggest moat against Meta by being the start page of the internet for a great many number of people. A whole lot of browsing sessions start with search and end with search, and this way Google can claim attribution for virtually every traffic a website gets outside of direct hits.
This keeps people developing content to please Google and running ads on Google platforms to get more traffic.
Yup. Search is gradually (for about 15 years now) being transitioned from a search feature to a self-serve ad-requesting platform. “Show up, type a term, and we will select 10 ads for you.”
> for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product
The quality of Google search lately has felt pretty meh, especially for generic topics that get hits for crummy blogspam. Google’s own AI results at the top are pretty much the thing keeping me there atm aside from inertia. My personal browser is on DDG which is fine just a tad slow comparatively
It's not as if they can't/don't also push ads at people in gmail, in youtube, Google maps, on android devices (phones, TVs, chromebooks, etc), in chrome, and they still have AdMob and AdSense and the Google Display Network
That is only half-true. On the one hand, I agree and I would never build a serious business on another single entity. But on the other hand, OP built an app that ran successfully for 10 years, generating some revenue.
Most products have an expected expiration date and you can provide a useful service (that generates revenue) by building on other platforms, even if it won't last forever.
By now I missed more opportunities by having the mindset of "not relying on other people's APIs" than real changes/shutdowns would warrant this kind of caution.
It's so sad that we're at such a devoid barren state.
There was so much hype & excitement in web2 age, about APIs & intertwingularity. Humanity was going to keep improving & iterating & crafting ever neater ideas.
Now it's all bureaucracy & lawyers arrayed to defend the cloud-keeps, moats & walls.
The user & agency of the world has been steady dimished, eroded away by ever advancing legal IP Protectionism.
That's not going to work in practice as money and time are limited. Choose your partners wisely but don't obsess over the scenario of them going bankrupt.
Also since national markets in Europe are relatively big by themselves a lot of companies tend to be satisfied with comfort of a single market success.
And once you've got control of one EU country, expanding to another EU country is just as complicated as expanding to the US is.
So if you're spending the same effort anyway, expanding to the US with 300 million people is much more profitable than expanding to Germany with 80 million people, or the Netherlands with 20 million people.
Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
Which is verifiably false.
Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?
There's literally a section on the Wikipedia article detailling how it launched in a handful of countries, expanded to the US, and only then expanded to most of the EU:
Spotify launched in Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, followed by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
After the US expansion, Spotify finally expanded to Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland
That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
You'd never see a US company launching e.g. only for Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada, expanding to China, and only afterwards become available in the remaining states.
> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
All that matters is the original comment: "Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order."
Where reality is Spotify became available in 7 countries before attempting to expand in the US.
Which is, funnily, what you literally wrote in your edit:
> That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
> Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
Sure, but they still decided to expand to the US, despite a worse outlook, before expanding to the remaining EU countries. As said, you'd never see a US company do that.
The US is a large, rich homogeneous market with a population of over 300 million. There's no wonder foreign companies want to get a foothold in this market, and it's no wonder US companies don't tend to look outside of the US until there's nothing to do in the US.
Sure, but that's exactly my point: The primary factor limiting EU startups isn't regulation, it's that they don't have access to a large, homogeneous, monolinguistic market
I own an ancient box copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and use it just because of muscle memory. Since a year or so, periodically it bullies me with a popup that my unlicensed software is going to be disabled and it shows every 15 minutes regardless if I run Photoshop or not. Can't close it without going to Adobe website.
I'll never going to buy or support anyone in buying anything produced by Adobe. Not going to cry if they go down either.
I'm also nursing along CS4 but (very fortunately) haven't seen that error. I'm woefully out of date, so maybe got lucky with that.
After many sleepless nights fighting with Adobe's licensing servers, which had erroneously declared my installation no longer valid, I keep an extra desktop offline with my 2nd licensed install ready for their next round of shenanigans.
I'm also 25 years into my programming career, and since my children arrived, I've been getting less sleep and have become accustomed to it. I must admit that my mental capacity and productivity have plummeted, as has my overall mood. It reminds me of the time early in my programming career when I quit using weed because I noticed a significant reduction in focus and memory, especially when working on complex codebases. I wish I could return to regular sleep patterns, but after a few years, it seems extremely difficult, if not impossible, without medications, which I'd prefer to avoid.
I hope the OP can try sleeping longer and compare his productivity.
I feel like Spotify generated playlists always lead me into some insignificant easy to listen background music and it feels like it's led by cost-effective algorithm that reinforced itself over years.
Audiogalaxy p2p (2002ish) had way better discovery feature.
> Seriously: stay away from most plastics and all PVC
Could you still test it wit EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate) foam? I use it for prop-making. While it's easy to cut with knife, CNC laser would make that stage much faster.
It all boils down to unmanaged technical debt that can have many forms - code, standards, architecture, documentation, tooling, compliance. There are two major indicators of tech debt - slow development pace and high amount of unexpected bugs/problems. Big projects have big capacities for such debt so it's visibility is also higher. Replacing "legacy" solution with a shiny new thing is declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh - it does not change the cause of poor tech debt management.
Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.