Firing the sales team = less income = some higher up will see declining profits = it will be killed
Read the article… It’s transitioning to a different ad team, so cost reduction when only one system for ads is needed. I don’t think this will be cancelled since their community is actively keeping it alive.
But Google traditionally is operating internal teams as competing teams. So Waze has a great chance of being seen as a “competing” product to Google maps. A customer sent to Waze might be seen as a customer lost to Waze. For example Waze added first the integration with Spotify in 2017, never supported Google play music and only after years it supported YouTube music. If they felt that they were under the same company (they were acquired five years earlier), they should have been integrated Google play music first, Spotify second (or both, GPM was killed three years later).
Regarding the community, i saw a lot of mods doing a lot of unpaid work. And i mean A LOT, they are investing hours of their free time to improve maps for a multi billion corporation. But when I tried to login, i had the impression that it was abandoned since the acquisition. The interface design is very outdated and it’s very hard for a regular user to find this place as it’s not advertised anywhere (i got the link when I sent a correction to the map from the app)
And corrections appear to be unidirectional. Something that gets fixed or flagged in Google maps doesn’t transfer to Waze, but the opposite happens.
Again on Android auto, Waze got split screen support 6 months after it was publicly announced and one year after it was available in the public beta channel on the play store. No communication between the two teams in the same company, the android auto team treated the Waze team as they were some independent company
Seeing Google history, i give 3 years max before they wind down Waze.
Enshitawaze
Google kills everything it touches
Why are they doing this. Waze was such an amazing tool
Title is clickbait, they are laying off the ads department and using Google’s.
They’ve integrated what they want into Maps navigation. Now they want you to switch and be happy about it.
No they didn’t. They show traffic info from Waze in Google Maps, but the navigation is still the old one, not the Waze one.
@KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world didn’t say Google implemented everything… Only that Google has implemented what Google wants.
Google maps is pretty damn good though - but I do like Waze for road trips
https://killedbygoogle.com/ is a great site to see them all. It’s A LOT.
288 services dead
Pretty sure if this was any other industry there would be a lot of shit thrown, but because its Google they somehow get away with it.
Damn, I missed the news about Google domains. That sucks. Squarespace domain pricing is typically pretty high.
Switch to cloudflare, they recently started with domains
Yeah it’s super frustrating too because google was one of the few places that you could get a .dev domain, and square space isn’t exactly the most logical place for a developer’s sight
Wait are we sure about Google domains? I literally just saw an ad for it yesterday.
Confirmed by Squarespace: https://domains.squarespace.com/
Wild they are still running ads
that’s okay! there are other great alternatives: the folks over at selfhosted@lemmy.world generally agree that porkbun is excellent (and i’d agree with them)
Google cross Reddit when?
Do Only Harm
Google’s business model is basically just killing things you love, right?
Classic Google
I’d like to see more Waze features integrated into Google Maps.
A lot of the data is shared back and forth, but yeah the tools are much better in Waze.
The reports of police and obstacles are also super useful and more plentiful then in Gmaps
And that is why Waze has to go away. It’s giving people info on cops, so that’s becoming politically inconvenient for Google.
But you can also report police speed traps on Google Maps too? (At least in the UK not sure if it differs by country)
Use the ones in Magic Earth.
Same. I’m surprised that they haven’t merged the apps years ago. I thought it was only a matter of time, but Waze continued to exist for many years.
Waze is quite a different experience than Google Maps when driving, so it’s made sense to keep them as two separate apps.
Google Maps is “I want to get from point A to point B in a normal way.”
Waze is “I want the most aggressively quick way; no back street is too small for me.”
I feel like OP has gone too far with the editorialised headline this time, as the only thing that’s happening at this point is switching Waze over to use the standard Google ad platform rather than their custom system.
Oh for fuck sake.
Fuck Google. I used Waze since it didnt need a Google account and was still reasonably popular in my area.
If I have to use a Google account for this shit, I dont know what I’d do.
Wait, since when does Google own Waze? I thought they were competitors?
Many years
It’s been 10 years.
Is there a decent open source alternative for navigation?
Can recommend Organic Maps, works great. Its Open Source and with OSM data. But its offline only so you need a lot of free storage space and don’t get stuff like live traffic infos, ratings etc.
Now is the time to start encouraging Waze users to try Magic Earth!
It also has social reporting features, uses open street maps, and has a real privacy policy.
Nice, i hope it doesn’t do like maps.me where they slowly enshittified the app
Later I’ll check if it has android auto support (if it doesn’t, it’s DOA)
do you know when support for Android Auto is implemented and working fully?
Just tried it, Android auto support is present and looks well done
Sorry to hear this, I really liked the social aspect of Waze where you could report things you saw on the road.
Waze editor here. Based on the article’s content, this post’s title is a bit of an overreaction. Google would be a fool to kill off a platform with more accurate street maps than its core platform, maintained by a vibrant group of volunteers, at least without creating or migrating those tools over to GMaps.
Oh sweet summer child. Google could turn off waze with no warning. Are you going to switch to bing maps? If every waze member stopped using any google service as a result, would their bottom line be affected in any meaningful way?
In my country Waze is the literal go-to app for drivers.
Kind of an alarmist headline, and not at all what the article says.
Bro whyyyyyyyyyyyy
How do we kill Google?
Degoogle!
DuckDuckGo
DDG has to get a lot better before that’s going to happen, sorry.
If you want a better alternative, Kagi is better than Google in my experience.
Kagi is paid unfortunately. That might not be a bad thing but it’s going to really hurt adoption when “free” Google still exists.
It’s not about mass adoption for me. It’s about not giving Google my info to resale. You should do what’s best for you, not what is going to get adopted enmass. I do see how you could’ve taken my recommendation as ‘killing google’ given the parent comment, though. Unfortunately Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.
I didn’t say it’s going to kill Google at all.
Huh?
DDG has to get a lot better before that’s going to happen, sorry.
Before what is going to happen then, if you didn’t mean kill google?
DDG has actually been a lot better when searching than Google ever has for me. The top posts aren’t always ads, I don’t have to keep rephrasing everything to find what I’m looking for, it’s been great.
