Comment by nickjj
7 hours ago
Yeah this seems to be a trend over the last few years.
Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it.
It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.
This happens to my family :-(
I host an Immich server for us. They don’t want Google Photos syncing and they know to watch out for the dark patterns, but, eventually, they come over with Google Photos syncing.
The other day my mother came to me with a OneDrive prompt on her Pixel. It was asking if she wanted to “free up space”. I’m pretty sure it was trying to get her to sync photos. I wish I would have taken a screenshot. She’s not low on space.
Of course, the only way space gets freed up is if they delete your local copies. It’s practically ransomware and they can’t figure out why people hate them.
If it makes you feel any better, on iOS all the google web pages and apps (like YouTube) continuously ask you to use or "open in" the iOS Chrome.
Google is an advertising company and the product managers there are now incentivized to tie everything to revenue.
or every time you click a YT link in firefox on android it asks "do you want to open this in the YT App?" where you're options are Yes (with an always use app checkbox) and "Cancel" to open in the browser. Like "Cancel" means "no, get out of the way and do what I want before you injected yourself in this flow"
You can disable the YouTube app's handler for YouTube URLs. In the app info, open by default. I haven't tried it, but presumably, all YouTube URLs will then open in your browser.
The worst thing is it even does it if your photos are being backed up, but to something that is not Google.
Those are dark patterns for sure. I don’t know how big companies can still pull that in 2026
People were eased into a defeatist attitude over time. Easily done when everyone's trying to achieve it.
Management and PM kung fu:
System working as pathologically-intended.
The root problem is there are seemingly no user experience quality KPIs on the development side to counterbalance revenue / usage / adoption ones.