Google suffers from Microsoft's issues: it has products for almost everything, but its confusing product messaging dilutes all the good things it does.
I like Gemini 2.5 Pro, too, and recently, I tried different AI products (including the Gemini Pro plan) because I wanted a good AI chat assistant for everyday use. But I also wanted to reduce my spending and have fewer subscriptions.
The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One, which is very convenient if you use Google Drive. But I already have an iCloud subscription tightly integrated with iOS, so switching to Drive and losing access to other iCloud functionality (like passwords) wasn’t in my plans.
Then there is the Gemini chat UI, which is light years behind the OpenAI ChatGPT client for macOS.
NotebookLM is good at summarizing documents, but the experience isn’t integrated with the Gemini chat, so it’s like constantly switching between Google products without a good integrated experience.
The result is that I end up paying a subscription to Raycast AI because the chat app is very well integrated with other Raycast functions, and I can try out models. I don’t get the latest model immediately, but it has an integrated experience with my workflow.
My point in this long description is that by being spread across many products, Google is losing on the UX side compared to OpenAI (for general tasks) or Anthropic (for coding). In just a few months, Google tried to catch up with v0 (Google Stitch), GH Copilot/Cursor (with that half-baked VSCode plugin), and now Claude Code. But all the attempts look like side-projects that will be killed soon.
I subscribed to Google One through the Google Photos iOS app because I wanted photos I took on my iPhone to be backed up to Google. When I switched to Android and went into Google One to increase my storage capacity in my Google account, I found that it was literally impossible, because the subscription was tied to my iCloud account. I even got on a line with Google Support about it and they told me yeah it's not even possible on their side to disconnect my Google One subscription from Apple. I had to wait for the iCloud subscription to Google One to end, and then I was able to go into Google One and increase my storage capacity.
The root problem here lies with Apple. It's so frustrating how they take a 30% cut for the privilege of being unable to actually have a relationship with your customers. Want to do a partial refund (or a refund at all)? Want to give one month free to an existing subscriber? Tough luck. Your users are Apple's customers, not yours.
I implemented Google One integration in an iOS app. This comment chain is accurate. Users want to pay with Apple (like other app subscriptions) but then your “account” is inside their payments world. Which is super confusing since users (rightly) think they are dealing with their Google account.
Sounds like the analysts and product owners didn't really want to solve this problem. Instead they ticked the boxes, got the bonuses, and the devs never questioned it and just implemented it for fear of being PIPed.
I'm sure there is technically nothing that stopped you from treating this "Pay with Apple" thing as just another payment method inside the google account, except maybe additional complexity and red-tape.
Seen this many times when PMs, POs, and Devs code by features instead of trying to actually solve something. I don't even want to know what mess of a database schema is behind this monstrosity.
This is exactly the kind of innovation Apple apologists don't realize they're missing out on in the walled garden. You could still have easy, centralized billing with all-in-one management and one-click cancellation, while paying 30% less for everything. Give the free market a chance.
Why do you think that's the only way? Payment processors have long been able to differentiate recurring transactions from one-offs. Capital One has subscription management.
How the platform and the vendor split that money is irrelevant to me, and I’m not convinced this would become cheaper - evidently consumers are willing to pay the current price, so why wouldn’t the vendor just increase their profit?
In the same vein: Games don’t cost less on the epic store despite their lower (compared to Steam) either, so as an end user it makes no difference where I buy games.
Maybe you like paying an extra 20%. That's your business. But fees like that affect the viability of lots of business ideas, including games. Having lower fees increases the pool of indie games.
You can't say a slave is free because their master is free to enslave them, and they're free to escape if they can. Sometimes you need rules to create real freedom.
Yeah, technically. But just everyone _normal_ just pays using Stripe often without even knowing about it. On the _walled garden_ all is so clear that my 70 years aunt is able to do it. And there is no exceptions to the rule: every subscription made through the App Store is there and it's cancellable...
30% is a robbery, and the confusion on the customer "ownership" is true, but it's not useful for the discussion to negate the advantage the _garden_ offers to the basic consumer
I bought my Google Photos subscription through the iOS app because it was cheaper than through Google directly. I have no idea why, but it was when I compared prices.
At least on my side, thats fine / intended. As long as their is no useable regulations around unsub dark patterns, that type of firewall is what I want as a customer.
> Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.
Enabling this like Ticketmaster enables selling tickets.
In ticketmaster's case I believe they give kickbacks and lucrative exclusive contracts with large venues, to squeeze smaller ones, maybe making whole tours use it but only kicking back to the biggest or select venues on the tour I think.
Apple sometimes does special deals and special rules with important providers, among many other tactics behind their moat. All single signons must also offer apple single sign-on, for instance, and they have even disabled access to customer accounts using their single sign-on for unrelated business disputes, though they walked it back in the big public example I'm aware of, the threat is there if you go against them in any way.
Ticketmaster is in no way comparable, because they gouge customers and provide no protections.
Someone in the music industry explained that both bands and venues like Ticketmaster because then Ticketmaster is the "bad guy" and the band can just shrug their shoulders and pretend to be the victim while profiting enormously from Ticketmaster's evil practices.
The problem is that other payment processors could emerge with the same trust profiles as Apple to facilitate this transaction.
I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.
Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.
Okay, all the app developers pull out of iOS because they're not actually useful, in fact they should be paying Apple!
How many people do you think would still buy iPhones if there are 0 apps on the app store? Lmaooo, it's almost like it's a co-operative relationship and Apple don't deserve a huge cut because it's the apps that sell their phones.
> The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One
It's not in Basic, Standard or Premium.
It's in a new tier called "Google AI Pro" which I think is worth inclusion in your catalogue of product confusion.
Oh wait, there's even more tiers that for some reason can't be paid for annually. Weird... why not? "Google AI Ultra" and some others just called Premium again but now include AI. 9 tiers, 5 called Premium, 2 with AI in the name but 6 that include Gemini. What a mess.
It gets even more confusing! If you're on the "Premium" plans (i.e the the old standard "Google One" plans) and upgrade to >=5TB storage, your "Premium" plan starts including all the features of "Google AI Pro".
Tip: If you do annual billing for "Premium (5 TB)", you end up paying $21/month for 5TB of storage and the same AI features of "Google AI pro (2TB)"; which is only $1/month more than doing "Google AI Pro (2 TB)" (which only has monthly billing)
Yes this is a well-known trope in HN about promotion-oriented launches, but this is just pure lack of proper messaging. I had a chat with one of Google's representatives, and they keep on saying "they do not have any information on this as of now".
This is less about internal systems and more about either incompetence or active sabotage.
It's interesting to see the most recent internet archive snapshot from last week. Just 4 tiers. Basic, Standard, Premium which don't include Gemini. There is a fourth tier called "AI Premium" that does.
There is a vscode extension that can basically be an agent but use gemini from the website which is cool.
But I found it to a little bit clunky and I guess I like the ui of google, I mean, the point is to get the point across. If you really hate the gemini ui, I am pretty sure that there is stylus extension which can beautify it or change the styles to your looking.
I guess I am an android user but still I understand your icloud subscription but if you're only choice as to why to not switch to google is passwords (but maybe you can mention more?), then for passwords, please try bitwarden, I found it to be really delightful.
The main reason not to migrate is that they cost the same, but I get more value from iCloud. You can probably say the same for Google One on Android; ecosystem retention seems to work well for Apple and Google.
I used 1Password in the past, and it’s possible to reconfigure most things to use another provider (passwords, app storage, etc.). AFAIK, you cannot reconfigure the full phone backup, which you must manually do without an iCloud storage quota. But why switch providers if I’m on the Apple ecosystem and the service is priced at the same price tiers? (I also use “Hide My Email” occasionally)
The only difference will be Gemini. However, my most significant percentage of AI usage is currently on desktops. The free tier of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude is okay for use on mobile.
The UI part that I mentioned is this:
Gemini is just a web app, which means that if you need to use AI from the selected text or the app you are using, you need to copy and paste or capture a screenshot. But ChatGPT macOS integration is much better. It’s a native app that you can summon with a key combination, and it can automatically put the active app/text in context.
I evaluated multiple options, and in the end, the winner for me was Raycast AI, because their app UX is incredible, and you can integrate your prompt with existing tools very easily. With prompts like: “For each item in the current selection, add a todo in @Apple Reminders”, or things like “Use @firecrawl to scrap the current page, then create a table with all the product prices and use @finder to store a CSV file”. You can save the prompt in a preset and use it as a Raycast command. That UX change was like night and day regarding daily AI usage. I chose to pay for the Raycast subscription, even if it was more expensive than switching everything from iCloud to Google and paying for only one service.
My point in the parent post is that today, Google is the company most well-positioned to be the absolute leader of the AI space. However, unlike OpenAI, they don’t seem to care much about the UX (at least outside Android), but if you use the assistant to work every day, the difference a good chat UX does is huge.
I like Gemini 2.5 Pro, too, and recently, I tried different AI products (including the Gemini Pro plan) because I wanted a good AI chat assistant for everyday use. But I also wanted to reduce my spending and have fewer subscriptions.
The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One, which is very convenient if you use Google Drive. But I already have an iCloud subscription tightly integrated with iOS, so switching to Drive and losing access to other iCloud functionality (like passwords) wasn’t in my plans.
Then there is the Gemini chat UI, which is light years behind the OpenAI ChatGPT client for macOS.
NotebookLM is good at summarizing documents, but the experience isn’t integrated with the Gemini chat, so it’s like constantly switching between Google products without a good integrated experience.
The result is that I end up paying a subscription to Raycast AI because the chat app is very well integrated with other Raycast functions, and I can try out models. I don’t get the latest model immediately, but it has an integrated experience with my workflow.
My point in this long description is that by being spread across many products, Google is losing on the UX side compared to OpenAI (for general tasks) or Anthropic (for coding). In just a few months, Google tried to catch up with v0 (Google Stitch), GH Copilot/Cursor (with that half-baked VSCode plugin), and now Claude Code. But all the attempts look like side-projects that will be killed soon.