Google has decided to trash another one of its many applications for no reason, throwing the AdSense app in the Google graveyard.
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Over the years, Google has acquired the reputation of being a company that regularly abandons, closes or ends up ignoring projects. This has resulted in the “discontinuation” (more like “death”) of services such as Google Hangouts, Google+, YouTube Gaming, Google Allo, Picasa and over 180 other applications, services and even hardware, and is one of the reasons why people have so little faith in new services of the company, such as their upcoming Google Stadia (cloud gaming) platform, wondering whether it will last long enough as to make it worthwhile. This time, the Google AdSense application for both Android and iOS is the next victim, with the company having announced that both will be discontinued and removed from the app stores by the end of this year, 2019. Some might have seen this coming, with the Android app last updated in December 2017, as it can be seen on Google’s Play Store:
According to Google, one of the reasons the company decided to trash the application is because “70%” of their audience uses AdSense through mobile, instead of desktop. The argument used is that by re-designing their mobile web interface, Google can easily support all platforms, without needing to support multiple different applications and have discrepancies between them. While this makes sense, Google is very quick to forget that a big part of the audience of this application are small web owners or YouTubers not making a living on their platform, and who check regularly their earnings on the go. The company might also not have realized what a mess AdSense is on a PC browser, taking longer to load than the time needed to open the app on the phone and quickly check the earnings for the day or the week. Furthermore, entire sections of the PC version do not work for some reason, such as the option of blocking specific advertisements and advertisement categories, with the same message popping up, specifying this feature is currently unavailable, even if it was available at some point in the past. For instance, this specific issue has been ongoing for such a long time that it is surprising that a company making over 100 billion euro a year hasn’t bothered resolving it yet, but, then again, let’s not forget this is Google, a company that would rather serve low-quality or straight up scam advertisements to users through their partners than actually bother doing something positive for once. Because yes, we’ve seen ourselves scam advertisements on our website (ever seen the 2€ 512GB USB keys? Well, we have… on our website… served through an AdSense ad…), ads that have been approved by somebody over at Google.
Google also seems to forget that by forcing users to go through the web, those wanting to quickly check their revenue will now have to open their preferred browser on mobile and either access AdSense through a bookmark or search the service each time.
Regardless, if we leave aside our complaints about AdSense, one can ask, does it really matter whether the application was last updated over a year and a half ago or not, taking in account it still works just fine? Is there a need to update something that does its job? Well, in Google’s eyes, the answer to this question is quite clear.
For those interested, Google’s poor excuse can be found on their AdSense blog.
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