We ranked 50 failed Google products from best to worst - Android

Google services and products have enriched the lives of tech fans, businesspeople, and basically anyone who’s ever been curious enough to ask a question on the internet.

We all know about Search, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, and, of course, Android. We’ve recently seen new names added to the Google hall of fame too — most notably the Pixel smartphone brand and Google Assistant-powered Home smart devices.

What about Google’s epic fails?

For all the Mountain View company’s many, many successes, a bunch of apps, devices, and other products it birthed or acquired ultimately floundered and died, often killed in unceremonious fashion.

Websites like Google Cemetery and Killed by Google (as well as Ars Technica‘s Google Kills Product series) are dedicated to tracking the big G’s dead products, so we thought it’d be fun to sift through the corpses and put together a list of the most interesting failed Google projects.

Here are the top 50 products in the Google Graveyard, ranked from best to worst!

Google Nexus (2010 – 2016)

Oh, Nexus. One of the saddest casualties of Google’s axe, the Nexus smartphone series should require no introduction to regular Android Authority readers. While the “core” Android experience lives on with the Pixel line and Android One phones, the Nexus brand gave us some of the greatest handsets ever made, offering killer specs at affordable prices. Google never officially killed the Nexus series, but after three years in the wilderness, it’s time to say goodnight, sweet prince. We miss you.

Related: The most important Android smartphones since the Google Nexus 5

Project ARA (2014 – 2016)

This short-lived project was definitely one of the best concepts nuked by Google. The idea was to divide all major smartphone components into modular parts. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars upgrading the entire phone, customers would simply upgrade a specific component. The ambitious blueprint was diluted over time until Google eventually pulled the plug altogether. This hurts even more in hindsight, as phones continue to surge past the $1,000 mark.

Google Reader (2005 – 2013)

Google launched Reader in 2005 as a free tool to easily aggregate RSS-enabled feeds from multiple sites. Google admitted Reader had “a loyal following,” but still decided to shut down the service as part of its brutal Spring cleaning in 2013, citing a decline in usage. You can still aggregate your content feeds using Feedly and other RSS platforms on desktop, and on Android thanks to a bunch of RSS apps available via the Google Play Store. Many still mourn its loss.

Google Talk (2005 – 2017)

Before Hangouts, Allo, Messages, and Duo, we had Google Talk — Google’s first and probably best messaging app. The service was free and integrated into Gmail, letting you send and receive instant messages within Google’s email client from any device. There were also Google Talk apps for Android, Windows, and Blackberry phones. You could even use Talk to place a real-time video call with a paid Google Voice account. Times changed, though, and Google’s (doomed) desire to plug everything through Google Plus spelled the end for Talk. It was slowly phased out for Hangouts, which later evolved into an enterprise-focused pair of apps for G Suite. Don’t worry, Google has plenty of other apps and services for your messaging and voice needs — too many.

Chromecast Audio (2015 – 2019)

Chromecast Audio was an offshoot of Google’s popular media caster that let users syphon digital music libraries through to non-smart speakers via a 3.5mm jack or mini-TOSLINK socket. The Chromecast Audio was discontinued in January 2019. I still use mine almost every day.

Inbox by Gmail (2014 – 2019)

Google launched Inbox as a Gmail offshoot with a more experimental slant. Innovative features like Smart Reply, snoozing, bundling, and much more gave the Inbox app an AI-powered edge over the standard Gmail client — at least until 2018. Gmail’s redesign incorporated most of Inbox’s smarts. Promises that the product would carry on as normal proved hollow as later that year Google called time on Inbox. It shut down for good in March 2019. Sad times.

Google Play Editions (2013 – 2015)

The precursor to Android One, Google Play Edition phones were essentially regular smartphones made by Samsung, HTC, and other OEMs  with stock Android. Almost exclusively available to buy direct from Google, the series included Google Play versions of beloved phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4, Moto G, and HTC One. We don’t necessarily want Play Editions back in their previous incarnation, but we’d sure love to see more Android One-ified models hit the market.

iGoogle (2005 – 2013)

The horribly-named iGoogle was an interactive home page for your browser packed with web-based “gadgets.” You could add and remove gadgets (simple widgets) or move them around within the browser window to fit your needs. Google said the need for iGoogle “eroded over time” due to the maturing capabilities of websites and mobile apps. Plenty of websites and Chrome extensions attempt to recreate iGoogle’s widget-based pages, but they’ll never match the magic of the real thing.

Project Tango (2014 – 2018)

Tango was another stepping stone project for Google. Sensing the dawn of an augmented future for consumer tech (which still hasn’t really arrived), Google built the Tango API for its AR ambitions. We got two Tango phones — the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and Asus Zenfone AR — before the project was canned in favor of ARCore, an SDK far less hardware-reliant than Tango that only needed a decent smartphone camera to work.

Read more: Tango was Google’s too soon moonshot, but ARCore can do better

QuickOffice (2004 – 2014)

Before Google acquired it, QuickOffice was the go-to office suite for Symbian and Palm devices. It also delivered the de facto document, spreadsheet, and presentation editing apps for Android, before Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides came along. A redundant service by today’s standards, QuickOffice was a superb alternative to Microsoft Office for mobile platforms.

Bump! (2009 – 2014)

If you ever owned an Apple smartphone between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 6 eras, you’ll probably remember Bump! As the name suggests, Bump was a clever little app that involved bumping two phones together to share photos and files with other users. The app sat at number eight in Apple’s all-time top ten charts for free apps in 2011 and amassed hundreds of millions of downloads. It also released on Android, but all versions stopped working after Google bought Bump Technologies and terminated the app’s functionality, all within the space of around four months. A sad end for a hugely popular and incredibly useful app.

Google URL Shortener (2009 – 2018)

Created as a simple tool to shorten web addresses, Google shut down goo.gl just shy of its tenth birthday. As well as shortening URLs, goo.gl links could also send web surfers directly to specific apps on iOS and Android. Google cited changes to how people access webpages and content as its reason for discontinuing the URL-shrinking service, but it’ll be sad to see the funky-looking short URLs go offline for good on March 30, 2019.

Google Desktop (2004 – 2011)

This was a nifty sidebar program you could install on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It placed a search toolbox on your desktop for scanning through local files, and offered quick access to a clock, weather, news feed, Gmail feed, and photos stored locally on the PC, among other things. Google killed off Desktop as it began to focus more on cloud storage. It was a useful bit of software that naturally became obsolete as desktop OS’ began to offer similar built-in features.

Google Fast Flip (2009 – 2011)

Before Google News, the Mountain View firm had a news aggregator called Fast Flip. The Google Labs project collected news from across the world and presented them in a clever, microfiche-esque style using text and images.

Google Labs (2006 – 2011)

Google Labs was a playground for experimental projects and was responsible for a lot of the abandoned projects listed in this article. The platform ran for five years, during which time “adventurous users” got to have some fun testing Google’s experiments and provide direct feedback to the engineers and researchers. At the time, Google’s stance was to “launch early and often,” but that seemingly changed when former CEO Larry Page said the company needed to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Several days later, Google announced the closure of Google Labs, citing Page’s cumbersome wood-based analogy.

Google SMS Search (2004 – 2013)

For a time, Google SMS Search was the company’s solution to wanting to look things up without having internet access. It let mobile phone users text queries (weather reports, sports updates, currency conversions, and the like) to a pre-set number. That number was 466453, which just so happens to spell Google on alphanumeric keypads. Clever!

Google Gears (2007 – 2011)

Gears was an open-source browser extension that enabled web-based apps to run offline. That sounds great, so why is it dead? All those features were built into HTML5 and hard-coded into web browsers, which completely eliminated Gears purpose for existing when the new platform launched. At the time, it was a noble solution to a common problem faced by web app devs.

Google Now (2012 – 2016)

A necessary evil to get us to the promised land of Google Assistant, Google Now was a Search feature with nascent voice support that bombarded Google app and Android users with predictive information cards. Assistant’s improved AI would eventually streamline all of Now’s more cluttered UI elements and transform Now’s stilted, one-way conversations into something a little more natural. It was still way better than Siri though. Siri sucks.

Nexus Player (2014 – 2018)

After failing to get the Nexus Q off the ground (more on that later) and with its semi-replacement Google Chromecast flying high, Google turned to Asus and Intel for help with its efforts to bring its nascent Android TV platform to the masses. Despite receiving support for two years after its discontinuation, Google never really got behind its full-fledged digital media player, instead focusing on Chromecast and letting other, better Android TV boxes represent the OS.

Google Moderator (2008 – 2015)

Made famous by then President-elect Barack Obama, Moderator was designed to aggregate a huge pool of user-submitted questions and suggestions based on crowdsourced feedback. A smart idea