Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/12 – The Google Photos Free-For-All Is Over

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Why Google sunsetting the free version of its Photos service has so many people riled up. Apple’s TestFlight update should make beta testing apps easier. Amazon’s Alexa Care Hub should make caring for elderly relatives easier. A “bank on rails” is an interesting raise. And is the HomePod mini worth buying? Sponsors: TinyCapital.com VistaPrint.com/techmeme Links: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage on June 1st, 2021 (The Verge) Google warns Google Drive users: Use it, or lose your files (Mashable) Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech (OneZero) Apple updates TestFlight beta testing app with support for automatic updates (9to5Mac) Amazon Alexa Care Hub update will make it easier to help aging family members (CNBC) Railsbank, the Banking-as-a-Service, raises $37M in growth funding (TechCrunch) APPLE HOMEPOD MINI REVIEW: PLAYING SMALL BALL (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Thursday, November 12, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Why Google sunseting its free version of its photo service has so many people riled up. Apple's test flight update should make beta testing apps easier. Amazon's AlexaCare Hub should make caring for elderly relatives easier. A bank on rails is an interesting raise. And is the HomePod Mini worth buying. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So the free ride is over. Google, has announced it will end its unlimited photos storage on June 1st of next year, thereafter imposing a new 15-gibite cap before they ask you to pay up for more storage.

But before you freak out, photos and documents uploaded before that date, June 1st of 2021 will not count against the cap, quoting the verge. All photos and documents uploaded before June 1st will not count against that 15-gigabyte cap. So you have plenty of time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or switching to another cloud storage provider for your photos. Only photos uploaded after June 1st will begin counting against the cap. Google already counts original quality photo uploads against a storage cap in Google Photos. However, taking away unlimited backup for high quality photos and video,

which are automatically compressed for more efficient storage, also takes away one of the services' biggest selling points. It was the photo service where you just didn't have to worry about how much storage you had. As a side note, pixel owners will still be able to upload high quality, not original photos for free after June 1st, without those images counting against their cap. It's not as good as the Pixel's original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it's a small bonus for the few people who buy Google devices. Google points out that it offers more free storage than others. You get 15 gigabytes instead of the paltry 5 gigabytes that Apple's iCloud gives you,

and it also claims that 80% of Google Photos users won't hit that 15 gigabyte cap for at least three years, end quote. By the way, even though this photos thing is getting... getting all the headlines. It's also worth noting that this is a sort of new storage policy for Google across the board, quoting Mashable. Going forward, Google says that if you don't check in on your Google Drive files every now and then, it may delete them. Google frames this change as a way to tidy up abandoned digital detritus, perhaps left over from long-forgotten accounts, which may be, sure, or alternatively, it may be that a Google user simply stored some valuable files away for a while, like one might with physical documents and a fireproof safe,

and simply hasn't peaked at them in a few years. Quote, we're introducing new policies for consumer accounts that are either inactive or over their storage limit across Gmail, drive, including Google Docs, sheets, slides, drawings, forms, and jam board files, and or photos to better align with common practices across the industry, explains Google in a blog post announcing the change. If you're inactive in one or more of these services for two years, 24 months, Google may delete the content in the products in which you're inactive, end quote.

In other words, Google at present has no plans to just start deleting your stuff willy-nilly. However, it's letting you know that come June 1st, 2021, the clock is ticking, end quote. But back to the free for all for photos ending. That's what's gotten everyone all riled up overnight. Which makes sense because this sort of touches all of our buttons when it comes to Google, right? Something, something never rely on Google services to be consistent forever or to even exist for more than half a decade. Google Photos has been free for almost exactly five years, by the way. But also, this strikes to the heart of the whole antitrust argument with which Google and other big tech companies are being tarred.

Quoting Casey Newton, Google earned $11.2 billion in profits last quarter and uses all your uploaded photos to train its machine learning algorithms, which offers it other enormous competitive benefits. Also seems notable that free Google Photo Storage helped to drive tons of startups out of this market, Everpicks, Loom, ever, picture life. Now that they're gone and Google is tired of losing money on photos, the revenue switch flips, end quote. And quoting from a widely read piece by Will Aramis in one zero, quote, it's a galling bait and switch and an object lesson in anti-competitive behavior by a big tech firm. The unlimited free storage offer was arguably Google Photos's top selling point, one that few, if any, competing providers could match. The company was likely willing to lose money on its service in exchange for the, the photos value in training its AI systems and for the value of keeping users in its broader

software ecosystem. What was once a hotly competitive and innovative space is now largely controlled by Google and a few other giants such as Apple. And this points to another set of losers, albeit a nebulous one, everyone who might have benefited from the new ideas and fresh features that were never developed because startups didn't stand a chance against Google. It would be easy to reach for a sardonic don't-be-evil reference here, but what Google is doing and why it matters isn't best understood in moral terms. At every step, it was just doing what successful companies do. It offered a great product for free because it could afford to.

It crushed competitors largely by virtue of being the best option on the market, and now it's raising prices because the free storage offer has served its purpose. Instead, this move is best understood from the standpoint of competition and antitrust. It's Google's vast size and scope, the way its products in different markets complement and cross-subsidize each other that gave it unmatchable advantages over smaller rivals. In retrospect, the free storage offer looks a lot like predatory pricing, whether that was Google's intent or not. But the bigger picture is that Google, like other dominant platforms, has its hand in so many different mutually reinforcing lines of business that it will always be incentivized to leverage them in anti-competitive ways.

From a certain standpoint, the standpoint of maximizing profit and shareholder value, it would be foolish not to, end quote. but I will give you this interesting counterpoint from Der Obisangio, who actually engaged directly with Will on Twitter about his piece, quote, this is why breakup big tech is sloganeering without a coherent policy. What breakup action would be recommended in this instance? Should Google photos be spun out of Google, meaning they'd have to charge for it from the jump, or that Google can't build new free products anymore? The article title is literally that this case is proof in antitrust remedy,

is needed. I'm simply asking how so. Google Photos is a loss leader. These are common business practices. McDonald's profit comes from soda, not burgers. What antitrust regulation would be useful here? Lots of commentary on antitrust and big tech is really, I'm mad at this company and want them to be punished. There is no government intervention that will cause a for-profit company to give you free unlimited storage forever, end quote. Apple has updated test flight. It's tool. It's tool. for testing beta apps on iOS, iPadOS, and TVOS, adding support for automatic updates, among other things, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The addition of automatic updates in test flight is a notable improvement. This means that when your beta testing an application,

the app will automatically update whenever a new version is released by the developer. Previously, you'd have to go to the test flight app and manually install updates. For developers, this also means that it will be easier to ensure that all beta users are using the most up-to-date version of the app. Prior to earlier this week's One More Thing event, focused on Apple Silicon, there had been rumors that Test Flight would come to the Mac as well. As of right now, that has not happened, and it does not appear that you will be able to run the iPhone or iPad version of Test Flight on Apple Silicon Macs.

Of course, this could soon change, end quote. Amazon has unveiled what it is calling Alexa Care Hub, which will help people care for aging relatives using the Alexa ecosystem, offering an activity feed that caregivers can review as well as emergency contact features, quoting CNBC. The company said it has been hearing from customers for years about using Alexa's voice assistant to monitor aging relatives who are increasingly looking to stay in their residences rather than move to a nursing home. The shift has created a more than $30 billion market for assistive technology, according to the Consumer Technology Association. As of Wednesday, customers with an Alexa voice assistant can link to,

their account to an aging loved one's Alexa account. If the family member accepts the invitation, their caregiver can send alerts and view their relatives' activity feed. That feed is more of a high-level summary that includes basic information, such as lights being used in the home, rather than a way to spy on parents. There's also an emergency contact feature where the loved one can simply say, you know who, call for help. You know who will then send an immediate push notification to the caregiver, end quote. Amazon says they have been working on this service for about 18 months, but decided to push it out ASAP, because since COVID-19 struck, people are often unable to see their relatives, especially their older relatives, in person.

Interesting raise Thursday. Rails Bank, which aims to be a utility on which other companies can build financial services, has raised $37 million led by middle game ventures and venture a capital, quoting TechCrunch. Rails Bank positions itself as a utility on which other companies, spanning FinTech startups, challenger brands to incumbent banks that want to refactor their tech, can build and sell various financial services or add fintech features to their products. When the company closed at Series A, Nigel Verdon, co-founder and CEO of Rails Bank, likened it to what Amazon has done for data centers with AWS. Quote, Rails Bank is a utility for the complete financial services backend, platform, connect

activity, operations, scheme memberships, regulation, and compliance, he told me at the time. More recently, and unsurprisingly, given recent fintech trends, RailsBank is also talking itself up as an embedded finance partner. The pitch is that RailsBanks APIs are the building blocks for customers to build pretty much any financial use case they can imagine. The use cases are also diversified with the top three being lending, banking, and savings-related, which are embedded into fintech, retail, telco, insurance, and other customer journeys, Verdon says. To that end, RailsBanks Credit Card as a service offering means that any company can offer a branded

credit card using the fintech's infrastructure and tech. In less than 12 weeks, we can deliver a credit card in the customer's brand, along with a user journey seamlessly embedded into the customer's existing user experience, explains Verdon. Our mission is to reinvent, unbundle, and democratize access to the complex, opaque, and Byzantine 70-year-old credit card market, which is worth $4 trillion in the U.S. alone, end quote. Finally today, one more hardware review in a month that has seen so many of them at the verge. Dan Seaford says Apple's new HomePod Mini has a compact design, is priced excessively, and Siri is fast and responsible, but as an actual speaker, it falls down a bit.

It simply doesn't sound as good as similarly priced competitors. quote, it's smaller, simpler, and way less expensive than its bigger sibling. And thanks to Apple's work on Siri over the past few years, it can actually do more than the original when it launched. It's clear that Apple designed this to complement the larger home pod. If you have an original in your living room, you can put the mini in various other places in your home without having to invest as much money or take up as much shelf space. But the rest of the smart speaker world has obviously not stood still, and Amazon and Google have released the most compelling options in their respective lineups this year. While Siri has gotten better, it's still the HomePod minis

Achilles heel. Well, that and the fact that you still need to be fully embedded in Apple's ecosystem to get the most out of it. With the first HomePod, Apple prioritized sound quality above all else. That's not quite the same with the HomePod Mini, but you can still hear the effort that went into making the mini sound relatively good. I say good, in quotes, because for its size, the HomePod mini sounds quite nice. It's considerably better sounding than the similar-sized 4th-gen Echo Dot, and it puts out more bass than other small smart speakers. The key thing to notice is that the HomePod Mini outperforms other small smart speakers like the Echo Dot and Nest Mini,

but it can't compete with larger speakers like the regular Echo, Nest, Audio, or Sonos 1. The HomePod Mini is priced closer to those larger speakers, although it really belongs in the small speaker class when it comes to the sound it can produce. At 3.3 inches, the HomePod Mini is about the same size as the 4th-Gen Echo Dot, and considerably smaller than the full-size echo or Google's Nest Audio. As a result, it has just one speaker, a downward firing full-range driver that is designed to evenly spread sound in all directions. Two passive radiators help to accentuate lower bass tones, but they shouldn't be confused with

the multiple active speakers that are in the Echo and Nest audio. At $100 compared to the original home pod's $350 launch price, the mini is priced low enough that you can envision buying more than one and spreading them throughout your home. It does most of the things you expect a smart speaker to do and sounds good when doing them. If you're already fully bought into Apple's ecosystem, including services, it's hard to fault the HomePod Mini's price or capabilities. It also provides an escape from some of the privacy concerns and baggage that come with the Echo or Nest smart speakers, including the increasingly common ads that show up in Alexa's responses. But it feels like Apple is still two years or more behind Amazon and Google when it comes to smart speakers. And

compared to the equally priced Echo and Nest Audio, the HomePod Mini struggles to keep up in both sound quality and features, end quote. Hey, we're going to test out a new kind of bonus episode next week. I'm going to call these new types of episodes, office hours episodes. The idea is we'll sit down with somebody in tech, not to talk to them about the latest news or whatever, but to talk to them about them, how they work, how they live, what tools they find most useful to do what they do, but philosophies of work and life and whatever else they live by to find success. The idea is to be less formal and more free-flowing to try to see what makes these people tick and also to maybe learn some lessons that will help all of us. So we could ask anything from, you know, what's the latest book they read,

to what apps are on their home screen, on their phones. Think of office hours as a way to get to know the people behind the headlines, but also to get a little inspiration and aspirational information from them. And as a part of that, we'll also allow any of you to join in on the Zoom call recording of the conversation. I'll probably end up asking most of the questions, unlike the listener call in episodes. I'll probably limit the questions to three or four so I can make sure we hit the areas of learning that we're looking to get into and keep the conversation on track. But hey, that's why we're calling at office hours. If you ever wanted to sit down with an important person in tech and pick their brain, this is your chance.

This is very much a nascent idea. so this first recording will very much be a test. And so because it is, I thought we'd start with someone easy who knows the show. So we're going to record the first office hours episode with Inventor of the hashtag himself and your podcast, Ombudsman, Chris Messina. So Wednesday, November 18th at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, 2 a.m., I guess GMT. We'll record an episode with Chris. I'll post the Zoom link at some point next week.

But yeah, if you'd like to ask Chris Messina anything about product design, about product hunting, about how he works and what he's passionate about, about how he does what he does, join us next Wednesday. Talk to you tomorrow.