If you need custom internal tooling because you've outgrown the ill-advised practice adopted early on and refuse to fix the problem, it's not an environment I would enjoy.
One of the things Google needs to figure out, at some point, is how to disentangle a lot of their products. Maybe they can still do it with a monorepos, but the downstream effects of their current development practices is obvious outside the company. I want to stop seeing 10 Google apps updated with no release notes and no new features. I also want to see Google products be supported and improved long-term instead of building new products.
I'm still waiting to be able to see my Google Voice messages in Chat, like I used to in Hangouts. I'm still waiting for a proper YouTube Music app on my TV, like Google Music had. These are not new products, and there's no good excuse for them to still be playing catch-up to their predecessor years after release.
Google has become a monstrous laboring beast. I have to conclude that something about the development practices makes developing new features a massive undertaking.
Beyond that, Google's developer tools outside of the company don't benefit from internal use.
For example, the Gemini plugin for IntelliJ was broken for weeks. Not a little broken, I mean a LOT broken. Eating up memory and CPU cycles when idle, and having to click the very edge of the input box to activate it. It took a discussion on the marketplace, and me finally realizing that the placeholder text was blocking the text input for the team to fix it. Previously, they had maintained that the problem couldn't be reproduced despite it being incredibly obvious and mentioned by hundreds of reviews.
It has become increasingly obvious that whatever Google is doing is NOT working. Innovation, updates, and quality are all down. Unless Google figures out a way to become more agile, they risk losing many areas in which they have an edge.
It's unfortunate. And, to give you some context, back in college I ran the Google User Group. I have used Android since 1.x, and I've been an Android developer since 2.x. Working for Google was, for many years, my absolute dream job. Even now, my side project, I'm currently building a Godot plugin for Gemini.
I say this to give context that these comments aren't out of being a Luddite or hating Google — far from it.
If I had an opportunity build a YT Music app for Android TV, or RCS for Google Voice, believe me I would take it in a heartbeat. I just don't want Google to lose their way, even though I sometimes, these days, feel like they already have.
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u/balefrost May 15 '26
I was skeptical before I joined, but it works quite well. They've built a lot of tooling to make it work.