Comment by lelandfe
4 days ago
An actual example of this lives in the Gmail iOS app. Click a link in an email and every x days, a sheet appears: https://imgur.com/a/nlGS4Yk
1. Chrome
2. Google
3. Default browser app (w/unfamiliar generic logo)
They removed the option for Safari some time in the last two years; here's how it looked in 2024: https://imgur.com/1iBVFfc
And the cherry on top of dark UX patterns: an unchecked toggle rests at the bottom. "Ask me which app to use every time." You cannot stop getting these.
The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.
Yes, I want through this last year and documented it in a screencast. This is how it looks https://mstdn.social/@can/115243851196253381
How is this legal?
Don't assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence:
* new automated UX experiments starts * the UI bot made a change that made the page unscrollable * the experiment has a much higher rate of retention then the control (because people can't scroll) * the experiment is deemed a success by results analysis (no one looks at the page to see WHY) * the experiment is blessed as the new pipeline
Such an obvious business improvement made by Gemini !
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It's probably not but no one has challenged them on it.
It's legal until somebody sues them.
Oh yes, I have had that! I tried disabling workspace for my brother-in-law through screen sharing and I thought it was a screen sharing issue. I successfully did it on my own computer but I’m glad to learn this was probably on purpose. I’m not crazy!
I get this on cookie consent modals too
Hanlon's razor applies.
I think there needs to be a new kind of 'razor': 'Never attribute mistakes to stupidity that benefit the ones making them'
The dressing up of purely malicious or greedy actions as merely resonable ones, that were executed poorly has become incredibly prevalent in the modern world.
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one time had cancel Google Colabs and really I couldn't figure out have to yell at them in support ticket to remove my subscription (eventually they did)
Welcome to the future :)
I was so mad when they removed the fourth option. I can't remember which one was which, but one meant "open in a webview inside this app" and the other was "open in a new tab in your default browser". It was still terrible UX but I liked at least having that choice.
I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed…
This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff.
I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.
The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.
It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused.
In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now.
Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention.
Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid.
You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale.
It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity.
Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench.
Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.
So goes Alphabet these days.
The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows.
If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
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>Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.
Have they ever been more valuable than now?
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I'm not sure where you are but at least here Microslop is still ruling more or less everywhere besides the online ad market.
They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year.
Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.
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This narrative has some critical flaws. Google is not just search or Android and hasn’t been for a while.
Sadly I'd say it's the opposite with them winning that antitrust case, none of these big guys give a shit anymore, they're basically slowly easing into doing whatever the hell they want.
Just to illustrate how bad Google has gotten, I've had the boomer habit of searching for a website name and then clicking the link in Google.
In the past 1-2 years I had to stop that, as there's a good chance I will be taken to some ad-sponsored link that has hijacked the search results.
For example, if I search 'Claude' the actual link to claude.ai will not even fit on a 1080p screen.
Alternatives are not that better :(
Also Google search degradation is partly due to the web becoming infested with AI slop and most content moving to chat apps, which are walled gardens by default.
The funny thing is that until like 2024 iOS actually HAD no default browser control, so this kind of thing was a huge help for people who wanted to use Chrome against Apple’s monopolistic wishes. Of course it’s fair to argue that it should be eliminated now. The commenter who mourned the web view option also has a good point, but tbh that ought to just be asked once and then live in settings.
Even when it had no default browser, it should only prompt for Chrome when a user has Chrome installed. I do not.
In addition, it should remember the setting forever and not keep prompting every couple months.
This is not a good faith attempt to let a user open a link in their browser of choice, it’s a push to get users to download and use Chrome. I can only assume users with Chrome as their default browser don’t get this needless slide-in.
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> I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.
Alas, I don't think it's a bug. A PM or VP probably got a bonus for this.
> How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Yeah this is kinda weird. I don't know if it's browser specific though. I use Firefox on my main computer and I think I still see it. Which means that the website owner opted into this weird pattern. No other auth providers do this. Just Google.
I opt into it on my site it's just a login option you can ignore if you want to log in another way, but for those who use it it removes the friction of writing out a password and verifying the email
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> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now.
It's indeed aggravating. Thankfully it turns out you can turn it off (and of course the option is extremely well-hidden): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customizati...
Having to use Google browser to disable Google’s own bad behavior is unacceptable.
But only on Chrome? I'm on Firefox and I see those prompts all the time.
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You can set a personal rule in Ublock origin to block these sign in with Google pop-ups.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_g...
> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now This drove me really, really mad last winter. How did they even achieve this? My policy is no US vendors. Period. Not for work stuff at least; not for things I depend on. What a mess.
> not spam it on every website just for visiting?
It's the website that spamming that.
Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts.
Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.
There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious).
I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with.
Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content.
All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.
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Google is guilty
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> This kind of thing should be illegal.
That's a bit silly.
Some people think pineapple doesn't belong on pizza, but that means you should avoid buying pineapple pizza, not outlaw it.
Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. The delivery driver also stays and watches to make sure you don't take the pineapple off and if you do, you're banned from buying Google Pizza anymore. It's a long drive to find a pizza place that isn't owned by Google.
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If you have a monopoly, different rules apply.
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I’m in the UK and use the Gmail app, I don’t ever see this sheet. Is this US-only?
I don’t see the sheet for imgur.com either because, well, they’ve blocked access completely for UK users. :shrug:
I see it in the UK.
The app settings offer a way to set default browser to the system default (which is what I have selected), as well as a toggle to “Ask me every time” — I have this turned off and never see the pop-up.
EDIT: also just tested turning this checkbox off. I then clicked a link in an email, got the pop-up, unchecked “ask me every time”, clicked default browser, and didn’t see the pop-up next time.
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An annoying extension of this is opening a Google maps link on mobile. It always prompts to open Google Maps (the app) no matter what. If you click no, its bugs the fuck out and opens an App Store link. If you click yes, even if you have Google Maps installed, it bugs the fuck out and opens an app store link. In neither case will it properly show the location on a first attempt. It's been like this for years. I'd ask what they're thinking when they came up with this, but I remain unconvinced that any such activity happens inside any Google offices today.
I think this is an Apple bug.
I’ve seen it with non-Google apps too. I’m not sure what causes it, but I believe sometimes you can long tap the link and select the correct option.
I believe the behavior where you say no and it still tries to open the app is because the default behavior on Google Maps links is to open Google Maps.
This happens to me now on Android. It either wants to download google maps or if I try to open in browser, it just repeatedly refresh loops before drawing anything. But not always possible it seems to get the address by inspecting the link
If you use iPhone, you can use iOS Mail app (and with iCloud mail) if you really care.
Apple dark UX pattern is that there always has badges on Settings app if you do not subscribe to iCloud even if you have manual backup. You cannot dismiss it.
I don't subscribe to iCloud, and have never seen these. Where do you see them?
This has tripped up non-technical family members who ask for help and aren't sure if they are required to pay for these things.
"What is Arcade, am I supposed to be paying for it?"
Sigh. Apple used to be better than this.
They keep enshittifying the experience for those not using iCloud Mail. They just removed the feature to use alternate email aliases on non-iCloud accounts on iOS 26.
I love the irony that the Imgur link asks you to install the Imgur app first
I don't understand why people don't use alternative mail clients to avoid that? Is the Gmail app the only one that is good enough? If so, and if it is essential to you, just go with the bundle (Gmail, Chrome, etc). (FWIW, I left gmail entirely, I pay for my email provider)
This would drive me insane! I'm glad I ditched Gmail altogether.
Please don't use imgur, it blocks off half of the internet. Use catbox.moe or imageban
the YouTube app does the same. Infuriating. I don't have Chrome installed and it doesn't list the only third party browser I _do_ have installed: Orion
Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?
The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use.
Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
>The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible
You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
> The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from.
Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email.
After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
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I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?
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It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services.
I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine
Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.
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Gatekeepers have to gatekeeper. Sigh.