The Google graveyard: all the products Google has shut down – The Verge

Google has finally killed the Stadia Bluetooth tool — but this person rescued it

2026-01-20T15:01:21-05:00

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.

I haven't tried Klay's mirror, as both of my gamepads are already converted, but here's my video on how easy the process is. It's worth doing now tha …

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Remember Google Stadia? Steam finally made its gamepad worth rescuing

2025-12-12T12:37:43-05:00

The Google Stadia Controller.

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.

@verge
Want to save a great g …

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Google kills its Keep app on Apple Watch

2025-07-01T08:49:17-04:00

Google hasn’t shown Keep much love since bringing it to Apple Watch in 2019.

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 …

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Google is officially dumping Assistant for Gemini

2025-03-14T15:06:20-04:00

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.)

"Additionally, we'll be upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches, to Gemini," Google says. "We're also b …

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Google’s taking the extra search box out of your search results

2024-10-21T17:39:37-04:00

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:

It's been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks search box in Google Search, and over time, we've noticed that usage has dropped. With that, and to help simplify the search results, we'll be removing this visual element starting on November 21, 2024.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it will probably make more sense if you see it:

See that little search box beneath the link fo …

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Saluting the Chromecast, one of the great HDMI dongles

2024-08-08T11:22:57-04:00

The Chromecast, in The Verge’s first review. | Image: The Verge

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.

It felt like pure magic. It was a basically …

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Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line

2024-08-06T11:02:14-04:00

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.

But now, Google says "technology has evolved dramatically" since the launch of the original Chromecast in 2013. "We invested heavily in embedding Google Cast technology into millions of TV devices, inc …

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Google is ending an experiment that let you annotate search results

2024-07-16T13:45:00-04:00

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.

"Search Labs is our testbed for bold experimentation and as we've shared, not all experiments will launch broadly," Google spokesperson Ashley Thom …

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PDF organizer Stack is the latest app to hit the Google graveyard

2024-06-26T10:37:58-04:00

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.

According to Google's support page, Stack's "functionality has been incorporated into the G …

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Google is killing infinite scroll on search results

2024-06-25T14:04:57-04:00

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."

In its place on desktop will be Google's classic pagination bar …

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