The Google graveyard: all the products Google has shut down

Did you save your Google Stadia controller like I told you last month? It’s still not too late. This week, Google has finally removed the tool that converts the now-useless controller into a decent Bluetooth gamepad. But there’s another way.

Christopher Klay, who previously developed the Stadia Enhanced browser extension, is one of many who saved a copy of the tool to a personal GitHub page. What’s more, they’re hosting a working copy of that Google website right here to make it even easier.

December 31st, 2025 is the deadline to save the Google Stadia controller. That’s less than three weeks from today — but there’s never been a better time. Last month, I discovered the controller is finally a first-class citizen in Steam and SteamOS.

The Stadia controller was originally designed to connect to your Wi-Fi network and remotely control games from Google’s cloud servers. But when Stadia shut down in January 2023, the company did an amazing job shutting down the service: it offered full hardware refunds and let you rescue the Stadia Controller by turning it into a generic Bluetooth gamepad instead.

The Google graveyard has claimed another victim: the company has killed the Apple Watch version of its Keep app. While the note-taking app is still available for iPhone and iPad, the 2.2025.26200 Google Keep App Store update released on Monday has removed watchOS support, bringing the total number of Google apps for Apple Watch back down to three.

This sours some hope that Google would expand its watchOS app offerings after quietly rolling out a new native Google Calendar app for Apple Watch yesterday, having initially pulled several Google apps from the platform in 2017. The Google Keep app was introduced to watchOS in 2019 but has largely been neglected since, lacking any meaningful updates. Now, Google Calendar, Maps, and YouTube Music are all that remain, with the latter two also in need of modernization.

Google is finally moving on from Google Assistant.

The company will be upgrading “more” users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months,” according to a blog post. The classic Google Assistant “will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores” at some point “later this year.” (9to5Google reports that phones running Android 9 or earlier and without at least 2GB of RAM will still be able to use the classic Assistant.)

For years, Google has included an extra search box within some search results, encouraging you to dig further and look only within a specific website. But now that sitelinks search box is going away because “usage has dropped.”

Google:

When I was still a starry-eyed 20-something living with my then-fiancée, the only way I could stream video on my TV was through its HDMI ports and my laptop. This had served me well for years — and still does, when I’m desperate — but dealing with the setup was cumbersome.

Then came the original Chromecast in 2013, and it was a revelation. Suddenly, I had this tiny black stick, shaped like an oversized key, that plugged right into my TV’s HDMI port and let me cast video through the air and onto my 55-inch screen in glorious high definition. And all it cost was $35? Incredible, especially in 2013.

Google is done making Chromecasts. In a post on Tuesday, Google says it’s “ending production of Chromecast” after over a decade of selling the streaming dongles.

Even though Chromecast devices will now be available “while supplies last,” Google says it will continue to push software and security updates to its newer devices without specifying which ones. The most recent update to the lineup was the Chromecast with Google TV released in 2022.

Google is ending a months-old experiment that let people attach colorful notes to search results, the company confirmed to 9to5Google.

Google announced the Notes experiment for Search Labs in November. If you had opted in to Notes, you could see and add annotations featuring text and images to links in search results in the Google app. (They were kind of a Google-y take on X’s Community Notes.) But given Tuesday’s announcement, it seems the test wasn’t popular enough to warrant a wider release.

Stack, one of Google’s experimental Android apps, is due to disappear on September 24th.

A product of Google’s Area 120 incubator, Stack was one of those overlooked gems that was just, well, useful: it allowed you to create or import PDFs and store them in different categories that it called Stacks: tax, insurance, medical, etc. The app would pick up data from the PDF to suggest a title, add searchable details like the date of the document, the amount (if it was a receipt), or the organization that issued it, and there was also a field to add notes.

The latest feature headed to the Google graveyard is continuous scrolling on search results, according to a report from Search Engine Land. The user experience, which mirrored the endless scrolling behavior of social media feeds, was originally introduced for search results on mobile devices in October of 2021 and then brought over to desktop search results in late 2022.

A Google spokesperson reportedly told Search Engine Land that continuous scroll is being removed today from desktop search results, while the feature will be removed from mobile results “in the coming months.”

I’ve been using Google Maps for years, and I never knew there was an option to message businesses in the app — that is until I saw this post from Search Engine Land, which says it’s going away.

The feature, called business profile chat, lets you message a business through the Google Maps and Search apps to ask questions, book an appointment, or request quotes. If a company has business profile chat enabled, you’ll see a “Chat” option next to the “Call” and “Directions” icons in Maps or Search. Tap on it, and you can start a conversation.

Google is shutting down its VPN by Google One service, according to a vague customer email seen by Android Authority, less than four years after it was rolled out in October 2020. The email doesn’t specify when this will happen, only that the VPN service will be discontinued “later this year.”

Subscription prices for Google One’s VPN start at $1.99, with availability on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows. The company told 9to5Google that it is killing the service because “people simply weren’t using it.” Perhaps its customers were simply spoilt for choice, given this is actually one of three VPN services provided by Google alongside the VPN offerings still available via Google Fi, and Pixel devices from the Pixel 7 on up.

Google Wallet was the company’s first attempt at enabling money transfers on Android with the Nexus S 4G, and no matter how many apps Google launches, it will seemingly always be around. Google Pay tried to replace both Google Wallet and Android Pay a few years ago, but in a few months, Google Pay will be gone, with Google Wallet back on top.

Android Pay popped up in 2015 as a temporary tap-to-pay king, while Google Wallet was recast as a Cash App / Venmo rival, but even when Google changed its mind and combined them, it couldn’t keep itself from messing with the formula again and again.

Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

The cache feature historically let you view a webpage as Google sees it, which is useful for a variety of different reasons beyond just being able to see a page that’s struggling to load. SEO professionals could use it to debug their sites or even keep tabs on competitors, and it can also be an enormously helpful news gathering tool, giving reporters the ability to see exactly what information a company has added (or removed) from a website, and a way to see details that people or companies might be trying to scrub from the web. Or, if a site is blocked in your region, Google’s cache can work as a great alternative to a VPN.

Every time another Google app or feature bites the dust — even a small, relatively inconsequential one — I get annoyed. Really annoyed.

Here’s the thing: there are Google Assistant-equipped devices in three rooms of my relatively small house: living room, bedroom, and office. Which means, unfortunately, that when I say “Hey, Google” out loud to my phone, I am just as likely to get a reaction from one — or more — of those three devices. (Yes, I know that’s not supposed to happen and no, we haven’t been able to fix it yet.) And they sometimes offer different answers simultaneously, which makes things even more confusing.

Several “underutilized” Google Assistant features will soon be joining the infamous Google graveyard — such as the ability to use your voice to send an email, video, or audio messages — as the search giant introduces changes it says will make the feature easier to use. The company is also changing how the microphone works in the Google app and Pixel Search bar.

Starting January 26th, users who activate any of the 17 Assistant features being removed will be notified that it’s being discontinued, with most features departing for good on February 26th, according to 9to5Google. This news comes less than a day after Google announced it was laying off around a thousand employees, some of whom worked on Google Assistant.

Google’s hardware division just took a body blow. The company has confirmed it’s laying off hundreds of hardware workers, especially in its augmented reality division — and 9to5Google is reporting that Fitbit co-founders James Park, Eric Friedman, and other Fitbit leaders are leaving the company entirely.

Update, 1:42AM ET: It’s not just Fitbit and AR. Around a thousand Google layoffs were just confirmed, and there may be more.

Google is about to fully move on from the Google Play Movies & TV. It had already moved Android and iOS users to the Google TV app, removed the app from every Roku and most smart TVs, and pulled the app from Android TV in October. In a recently published support document, however, Google detailed the ways you’ll be able to watch the shows and movies you’ve bought through Google Play Movies & TV once the brand is gone for good in January.

If you have a TV or streaming device powered by Android TV, you can watch things you’ve purchased or things you want to rent from the Shop tab starting January 17th, according to Google. If you have a cable box or a set-top box that runs Android TV, you’ll watch / rent from the YouTube app starting that same day. And on a browser, YouTube is the place to go, too.