Google Now: a dense, ad-funded weather widget
The current temperature is…
Google Now is a an Android weather widget. With ads.
Oh sure, It shows the current weather at my geographical location, and an icon of today and tomorrow’s forecast. But it’s ugly, very ugly. And as I mentioned, it has ads. Creepy targeted ads.
And yes, I realize that Now is supposed to be a lot more than that. Last year, I opted in to Google Now, enabling all of the history storage, information sharing, and creepy, evil tracking behavior that lets it work its magic and proactively provide me with information I can use. After months of sharing my innermost secrets with Google and its ad partners, what is the payoff? The current weather.
And it sometimes shows advertisements. These advertisements are based on my recent searches. So, it’s like a weather widget paid for by creepy invasive ads. (Never mind that a nicer weather widget comes with Android, and I can find 50 in the Play Store, etc…)
Sometimes it will helpfully display my “distance from home” or “drive time to work”. Except, and this is important, I don’t live at Boot Barn. I guess it has no way to cope with a person who works at home. I mean, yes I love Boot Barn, but this location is right next to Harbor Freight. If I lived there, I’d be forever broke.
Welcome to your new home. Hope you like boots.
I can live at Boot Barn, or I can work at Boot Barn, and that’s that. When I update Now with correct information for where my home is, it will swap and say that I worked there. And vice versa. At some point I stopped trying. Any time I want, I can type Home into the Navigation app, and be directed to Boot Barn.
If I open the full-screen app, Now will frequently ask me if I “Care about distance to this place?” As far as I can tell, that place is a place where I stopped to wait for a red light on my way through town. So far it has not asked me about the distance to any place that I actually regularly go.
This Wendy’s is precious to me
Yes, I admit it, it also shows calendar notifications. Just like all of the parts of Google Now that work, these are a standard feature of the phone. I’m sensing a trend here. Google Now provides… no added value whatsoever! Got it.
I really don’t understand what they were hoping to achieve with Now, but I can only assume it was more than this, in which case they failed. I was planning to give it until the end of March, but I think this may be its two week notice.
Why, Google? Why?
