I have an enterprise account and they added this button today. Guess what used to be there? The profile image where you could so conveniently swipe up or down to switch between gmail accounts. This is the kind of UI garbage that makes you want to move your entire company to another service just because you can.
It's on my desktop Gmail and I've been having a shitty time trying to disable it and remove it.
Literally asked Gemini how to remove Gemini and it said it did not know, then I called it stupid, and then it apologised and said I can remove Gemini in the Gmail settings, but I couldn't find the option after yelling at it in all caps and it's still there just taunting me
Gemini is completely unusable... So many questions are redirected to what they want me to ask, and not to an answer for what I asked. I wouldn't be against this if I could turn it off and if it actually added any value.
Gemini: "to create a folder, right click on the desktop, select new, them select folder. When the folder icon appears, type the name you want for your new folder."
Me: No... in Gmail!
Gemini: "Gmail is a google service for emails"
Me: No! How do I create folders in Gmail??
Gemini: "Email folders are a great way to sort and organize your emails into easily searchable categories."
It gets worse. If you have "smart features and personalization" turned off for your Gmail account, which I do, you can't even ask Gemini anything. Not even to get the inevitably wrong answer.
But this still doesn't remove the damn button for it from the corner of your screen.
I asked Gemini to set up a counter as I always did on the other assistant and decided to tell me how much time there was left instead. I also asked it to play the news and it said it would but never did. I asked it if all cats knead and gave me a long explanation of what cats need. 😅
I can excuse the last one because of homophones even though ChatGPT got it immediately.
Apparently they can't roll out Gemini to my phone because I never gave them my birthday. It's a really old account and they've been sending me notifications to add my birthday for years.
It's for the best, I used to ask Google assistant for alarms and basic searches sometimes, Gemini gives excruciatingly long responses that won't shut up and recently started responding with things from my past emails assumingly from the Gmail account needed to set up the phone. So now I don't have Google assistant, and will no longer search anything with Gemini out of principle. Need a new phone OS it appears
I accidentally triggered Gemini while taking a close-up photo of something in my hand. It threw up a nearly full-screen "how can I help?" message. I muttered "fuck off", and the message now read, "I'm sorry you feel that way..." Oh my god no. NO. Gemini now disabled.
Despite have AI off as much as possible within our Google Workspace at work, today all of my coworkers have received multiple ads / prompts by Google to use Gemini. In Gmail, in Google Meet, and more. Our policies don't allow us to use it so this is just ridiculous.
While we are talking about shit that Google pulls that drives us crazy can we talk about the pop-up asking me if I know about driving mode EVERY SINGLE TIME I LAUNCH MAPS FROM MY CAR.
I fuckin know about it Google. I have said yes every single goddamn time. Stop fuckin asking me.
I replaced gmail with fairemail for similar reasons. I can't stand their interface, designed to maximise clicks on the wrong locations.
Main problem is that now google requires developers of email clients to give $4000 in annual fees (level 3? or level 2 for just $500 is enough?) at their friends at KPMG to do yearly audits of the code, so they will kill most alternatives in few years now that oauth is mandatory
I used to use FairEmail, and IMO it's one of the best email clients available on any platform, but it started acting weird as my account got larger. Taking forever to sync, not sending emails (just keeping them in the outbox), etc. I switched to K9 Mail, which has now become Thunderbird for Android.
Main problem is that now google requires developers of email clients to give $4000 in annual fees (level 3? or level 2 for just $500 is enough?) at their friends at KPMG to do yearly audits of the code
On one hand, I think audits are a reasonable idea. Some of the most sensitive data is in people's emails, and most accounts can have their passwords reset via email. You really wouldn't want malicious code touching that stuff. On the other hand, that's definitely a large expense for an open source project :/
I'm glad some providers are moving towards OAuth or OIDC for logging in to email. Regular auth is very outdated and doesn't support two-factor auth. It'll just take a while to get there.
for FOSS projects, google itself could sponsor the certification, if they really cared about security and not just closing the garden. The code is public and they could definitely write automated tests to check all they need to check, and at every single commit, and not just yearly, done in secret by some auditor.
For google drive integration, i saw that most devs are just removing support for it because doesn't make sense to pay $500 yearly to support it when there's a million of better alternatives
It must be infuriating to work for whoever makes these decisions. I don't think I would ever actually email them about anything because there'd be no way I could possibly trust that the reply I get is actually something they wrote
Yeah I used to go in the menu and click the other accounts one at a time until a friend showed me. Its this and removing the youtube click to add to queue popup that drive me bananas. They both worked so well why would you change it?
In my non-enterprise accounts the profile pic is exactly where the Gemini is now. So I flip thru them and it moves back and forth. Just real dumb. They could have added the Gemini button inside the search bar and I could have kept ignoring it.