Summary

The author argues that Google's products are inferior to Apple's due to Google's lack of customer support and other issues such as short-term Android update support, questionable privacy practices, and a history of abandoning projects.

Abstract

The article titled "The Sole Reason Why All Google Products Are Inferior To Apple" presents a critical view of Google's product ecosystem, emphasizing that the primary issue with Google's offerings is the absence of reliable customer support. The author, Attila Vago, points out that while Apple provides comprehensive support to both business customers and end-users, Google's customer service is virtually non-existent, even for business clients. This lack of support is seen as particularly egregious given the long-term relationship and loyalty customers have with tech companies, where the choice between ecosystems like Apple's iOS and Google's Android is often limited. The author also touches on other problematic areas within Google, such as the short lifespan of Android update support, privacy and security concerns, an exploitative business model, unethical data mining, and a track record of abandoning projects and frameworks without clear migration paths. The article suggests that despite the imperfections in Apple's products, their customer support bridges the gap, making their products more appealing and less frustrating to use.

Opinions

Google's customer support is deemed the worst, with no effective channels for users to seek help, not even for premium YouTube users.
Apple's customer support is highlighted as a model example, offering live, 24/7 assistance, which justifies their premium pricing.
The author criticizes Google for a range of issues including poor Android update support, security and privacy concerns, an opaque business model, and unethical data practices.
Google's history of abandoning projects and frameworks without providing clear alternatives is seen as detrimental to the developer community.
The article suggests that customers are willing to tolerate imperfect products if they come with reliable support, which Google fails to provide.
The author expresses that poor customer support not only results in loss of customers but can also lead to vocal dissatisfaction that can harm the company's reputation.
The author identifies as a technologist and software developer who has experienced endless pain and frustration with Google's products, contrasting this with a generally positive experience with Apple.
The author believes that Alphabet (Google's parent company) is incapable of creating frustration-free products, which is compounded by the lack of customer support.

The Sole Reason Why All Google Products Are Inferior To Apple

And no, this is not an Apple fanboy story, it’s so much more than that…

I swear, COVID didn’t mess my brain up. This is not a clickbait story meant to draw readers in and leave them with nothing but a big fat “zilch”. This story is one of those that I never planned to write, but ultimately decided to so that you get a moment to sit down and truly look at the products you use on a daily basis.

I will not be glorifying Apple in any shape or form. Lord knows, they mess up on a yearly basis and do so quite royally. I will, however, be extremely harsh on Google — well, technically Alphabet — unforgivingly so in fact, because really, the comparison here is not between them and Apple, but acceptable products and sub-par.

There are many things that frustrate people when it comes to Alphabet. Some are affecting the average user, others affect only the business customers or the software developers. Just off the top of my head, some of those are:

Very short-term Android support for hardware in terms of updates.
Questionable software security/privacy.
Opaque and potentially exploitative business model.
Unethical mining of their users’ data.
Half-baked projects they abandon with no real migration-path in sight.
A history of poor developer experience and framework abandonment (Angular.js).
Opaque service status.

But the biggest of them all is something entirely different, and many people would forgive all of the above if this one last aspect would be handled well at Alphabet — customer support. It’s the company with by far the worst customer support there is. It is beyond appalling or infuriating. It is the most shameless slap in the customer’s face.

Now if you’re getting your handwursts ready to type me a comment about their business customer support not being all that bad, I dare you, but first take a step back and reconsider. Should there be a difference between a business customer and an end user when it comes to customer support?

At the end of the day, both business customers and end users are customers of a business, and providing quality support to both will make or break your business.

I did not think this was the case until about eight years ago, when I had to deal with some Apple issues. Used to not having customer support for any of my personal IT needs, I went ahead and searched online for a solution only to find out that at Apple you can just call a number, schedule a call, start a chat, and literally within seconds get connected to an actual human being who would genuinely do their best to solve my problem.

My jaw dropped when I realised that owning an Apple product means getting access to live, 24/7 customer support. Suddenly, the Apple price-tag started to make sense.

You see, when you buy a car, you have official hotlines you can call, or you can call your dealer and even the authorised repair-shops. The bottom line is, there is always someone to take your problem seriously within the next 24–48h. I know, I used to be a Nissan Brand Ambassador (fancy name for customer support agent).

If you stop and think for a few more seconds, it starts to make sense. Be that a software or hardware-related question, Apple, Google, and all the other tech companies out there, get a long-term business from us. There isn’t enough competition out there to choose anything else than Android or iPhone, for instance. The online services we use are also often part of an ecosystem that we just tend to stick to. What are the chances of just dropping YouTube and opting for a competitor? Well, very slim because there is no real competitor out there. Yeah, yeah, I know about Nebula, but that’s not a YouTube competitor, but more like some YouTubers’ side-gig.

So, if we pay for software over many years, aren’t we entitled to customer support?

Of course, we are, and if you look at Apple, it’s clear that once you own a product, you have every right to expect being tended to when issues arise. Don’t get me wrong, Apple’s customer support doesn’t employ magicians either, and at times it can become a lengthy back-and-forth, but I have yet to meet a situation where ultimately the issue wasn’t addressed. This is the aspect that Alphabet and all its child-companies don’t take seriously at all.

Just the other day, YouTube’s history feature stopped working. Was there a dashboard I could check their service status? No. Was there a number I could call? Nope. Was there a chat option to ask what’s going on? Nope. Even as a paying YouTube Premium customer, I had to resort to Twitter and post one of those publicly shaming tweets @YouTube, hoping someone would notice.

Google might think they’re too big to fail, but entire countries have been torn apart by a fraction of their current customer-count.

As a business, the last thing you want is provide customer support so bad, that you don’t just lose your customer, but you genuinely piss them off. Customers who just drop you and move to another service are usually not vocal about it, but pissed off customers can become incredibly vocal, and we all know that just one voice that’s loud enough can stir some real shit up, and turn it into a deafening echo.

Get anything from Google, and you’re on your own. Get anything from Apple, and you have someone on the other end of the line.

I am a technologist, I am a software developer, and every time I think of anything coming from Alphabet, I am full of skepticism and ready to experience endless pain and frustration. And it’s not because I like Apple. It’s because I absolutely dislike everything Google and every time it mattered, Apple came up top. Whether people like to admit it or not, we often like things not just because, but rather because it makes more sense to us than the alternative because its ownership and usage comes with less frustration.

This is Alphabet’s problem in a nutshell — it is utterly incapable of creating frustration-free products, be that hardware or software. And to top it all off, it doesn’t plug that gap with stellar customer support. People are happy to accept imperfect products, but only when they know the company that released them is there to support them through those imperfections.

Simple as that. Lacking customer support makes every single Google product inferior.

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Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!