I can’t remember the first time I saw Google Play Music. It must have been somewhere around 2014, or 2016. Whichever the year, I never got to use it. Together with Drive, Duo, Google Text to Speech, Hangout, Google Play Music is one of those blot apps I usually head straight to the Apps settings to disable immediately I acquire a new phone – and that’s because the phone’s manufacturer always include their own music playing apps that work just fine.
Then there is this obsession by big tech companies to create several apps for exactly the same purpose. Consider Google Duo, Google Allo, and Google Hangout – all by Google meant to provide exactly the same service – chatting. Now, instead of improving the capabilities of hangout that had been widely adopted by Gmail users, Google decided to launch these other apps to compete with hangout, making the company to lose out to competitors such as the newcomer, Zoom. It is not just Google that is the culprit. We have Facebook that has Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger that basically do the same things.. Microsoft couldn’t even decide to simply upgrade Skype seamlessly even after buying it for $8.5 billion. Instead, it decided to come up with a competing platform, Microsoft Teams.
Google seems to have realized the mistake with their Play Music, and that’s why in 2017 it decided to pull a plug on it, but didn’t take it out of the way immediately – probably as it still didn’t know how to allow users of Play Music to easily switch over to YouTube Music. Today however, Google has introduce a button at YouTube Music that will allow users to transfer their music collection from the Play Music to YouTube music, and by around the end of the year, we will no longer have Google Play Music occupying unnecessary space on our precious devices.
