This is one service where I am perfectly fine if I never receive any notification

Oh..and the clickbaity headline got me again.. All while I was looking for how some hacker exploited it and got Expedia's business

Have mentioned it before. Watch any recent videos of Yuval Noah Harari and he almost always talks about the concept of 'The Hackable Human'. Forget about what data they have. Soon they will know more about you than you do. It has far reaching effect but let's hope humans find a way to keep outsmarting technology.

I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they made an update where certain features were deprecated in the tier that we were in. One fine day the product stopped working.

The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their 'couldn't care less' attitude.

Early Firebase PM here: which feature was this? I don't remember us making decisions where things abruptly stopped working, but please let me know what happened and I'll take a look.

Thanks for getting back. How can I reach you? I can send you the details. We were not even in the free tier. But for some reason after having our credit card information for close to 6 months, it was disabled since some more information was suddenly asked. I agree that some of it might be legal. But for heaven's sake don't automate the hell out everything

Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?

And it may well be that "the tier that we were in" was the free tier.

But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone?

Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a use by date that is only known to Google.

May be so, but Google made sure that "the tier they were in" stays "nothing by Google, ever" for that particular company.

While I agree with you; I believe this is non-reversible. If it's not this company, 10 others will be launching their products in the next few months. Humans have become hackable and unfortunately our strength to innovate is the one that's becoming our bane. As Yuval Harari points out; in the short future companies like Google, FB will know more about us than we do.

In sometime the discussion will be why business people love PWA so much.

Clear abstraction anyone? We make it mandatory to separate the Managed service code to separate interfaces and implementation. We have the same code running both on Azure and AWS each leveraging their respective managed services. Just implement the interfaces for your need. It's not difficult.

Pls. God no.. Why this obsession with apps when a simple PWA does almost all you need. Apps are akin to what the windows app were a one and half decade back. Like web apps blew 99% of thick client app to oblivion the same is going to happen soon to the mobile apps. It isn't without reason, why Apple isn't too keen with this development (they were one of the last to implement web workers and PWA in their browsers). I hope they learn from MS' mistake and embrace PWA rather than try to impede

It was Microsoft's embrace of PWAs that finally made me change how I see them.

Apparently it is still unknown to most HNers that PWAs can also use native APIs, depending on how they are distributed.

I have mentioned this to many.. Satya could go down as one of the greatest turnaround masters of all time. I had consulted with MS a long time ago (2005-6). The work place was toxic. I might have been with the wrong group..but even uttering Java was considered sacrilegious. If you took a Mac to their office, the security would look at suspicion. Needless to say, I never returned back after my stint. Fast-forward. MS is the largest contributor to Linux source. In MS Ignite conferences, it's not about Windows and .Net anymore rather you would find healthy all round discussions. The developer community has slowly started trusting them more than other biggies. Not just Satya himself but he has his second line all focused in creating a customer friendly environment. I will put my money on MS till Satya is at the helm of affairs.

Moreover..PWAs are not meant to replace websites. They are meant to replace Mobile Apps. Almost all business apps can be replaced by PWAs without the rigmarole of creating an app and publishing on Apple and Google store.

I absolutely agree with you there. I bet if we ran a compression algorithm on all the apps in the app store, we would achieve a 90%+ reduction, on account of all the repeated boilerplate code!