If you haven’t read it on the news, you’ve probably seen the email from Google. Starting June 1st 2021, the free storage for life is coming to an end. And high quality backed up pictures will count towards your 15GB quota. This is them going back on a promise they made not so long ago when they introduced free backups for life.
So what are the things that will be affected:
- Google has said photos you backup before that date won’t count towards the 15GB quota, so you have until then to keep backing up pics for free. But after then, you need to find new ways to not fill up your storage, or just buy storage from them every month.
- You won’t be able to use the free up space as freely as you do nowadays, because come then, when you back up it will be eating up your cloud storage.
- If you choose to use another platform to back up your photos, you’ll need to either transfer all your thousands of pics from Google Photos, to the new platform, or keep switching between the different platforms to see new and old pics. Argh!
It is particularly annoying that Google has let us not only backup millions of photos to their service believing it will be free for life, but has used that data to build its facial recognition software, and build AI-powered editing features and much more, only to later on go back on its own promise. Meanwhile, they keep pushing Google ONE, their online storage feature which you pay for monthly.
But this isn’t the first promise Google has broken. Here are some of other apps, services and hardware Google pushed, then ultimately just killed after having users trust and use them for a while:
- Inbox by Gmail – I have complained time and time about the decision to kill this app. It was the best thing to happen to email and they ended it with no explanation why.
- Chromecast audio, Google Nexus, Chromebook Pixel – LOL.
- Google Trips – yeah.
- Remember Google Allo?
- And can you remember Google+, the social media site?
- Google Play Music – very recently they killed this service, and forced people to YouTube Music.
- YouTube Messages – once upon a time, you could share messages on YouTube.
- Bebapay – heard of it? The payment system they built with Equity Bank?
- And many more!
Why the hell should anyone – after all these disappointments – trust any new Google service when they keep proving that they can at any time go back on their words?
