I love Google. They’re one of the largest companies that consistently pump out great content. We all know about their miraculous search engine that lets us know about pretty much anything within seconds.

But what about their other products and services? Sure there are the greats like Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Docs, etc., but a majority of their products share a massive flaw: fragmentation.

The OS Problem

Perhaps the least known example of fragmentation in the Google ecosystem is their fragmentation in operating software. Google has created Android and Chrome OS, and although they seem like much of the same software, they’re aimed at very different devices.

Android is aimed at mobile phones while Chrome OS has their sights set on laptops and computers. Since Chrome OS has the ability to run Android apps, they’re becoming very similar operating systems.

Because of their separate but similar systems, Google could be rolling out a third OS in the near future called Fuchsia. Fuchsia could be a replacement for both Android and Chrome OS which would likely render both of those platforms obsolete in a not-too-distant future.

This theme of similar yet different has shown up in many of Google’s services and has already led to some other services being shut down.

The Email Problem

We all know of Gmail. Almost everyone reading this has a Google-based email account. It’s a services that likely isn’t going anywhere, but that’s partially because they recently announced that they are shutting down their other email services aptly named “Inbox.”

Inbox was Google’s sort of playground for testing the limits of how email could work. They used it to experiment with features. Many of those features were worked into gmail (like smart reply) which made Inbox not-so-experimental.

At the time of writing this article, Inbox still has 10 million+ downloads on Android alone. With Inbox’s closing on the horizon, that means that all 10 million users will have to jump ship and adapt to a wholly new environment. Sure it may be inconvenient, but it’s a genuine pain point trying to work in Google’s ecosystem.

Things are able to shut down and go missing at any moment.

The Messenger Problem

Surely a company so big only has the problems mentioned above, right? Wrong.

If you’ve tried to use a google messaging service, you’ll have realized that they have more communication apps than a person can count:

• Messages | SMS Messaging
• Google Allo | Instant Messaging
• Hangouts | Instant Messaging, Video, and Voice
• Hangouts Meet | Video Calling
• Hangouts Chat | Instant Messaging
• Hangouts Dialer | Voice Calling
• Google Voice | SMS Messaging and Voice Calling
• Google Duo | Video Calling

I probably missed a few, but it’s already an exhaustive list. Google’s Hangouts service on its own has four different apps that all do essentially the exact same thing as their other apps.

With this many apps in production, some of them are bound to be shut down at some point. Google had a hard time finding a reason to keep two email services. It’s going to be next to impossible to keep up with the sheer multitude of messaging/calling services.

Between the lot of them there are billions of downloads and any one of those services could be shut down for some new services that come along to fix the fragmentation.

It’s not unlikely to think that their list of 8+ apps could be condensed to just three (or less) to handle all of those tasks.

The Real Problem

None of Google’s services are bad. In fact, they’re all very high-quality apps. Some of the best, really. But if you buy into the google ecosystem and rely on it to be productive, then you run the risk of Google finding the need for more services.

Essentially, they could, at any moment, realize that they don’t need the service you’ve been working on this whole time. You could be forced to jump ship and try out their alternative (which could face the same issues), or try a new service altogether.

It’s a game of being backed into a corner until you find the next room or leave the building.