Google News & Weather

~ the goodbye ~

On 8 October 2018 Google turned off News & Weather, and on 9 October it was working again. The second shutdown, eight days later, is the one that held.

Before any of that it had the least glamorous origin an app can have, which is that it was already on your phone. News & Weather shipped as a stock Android item for years, the sort of thing sitting in the drawer next to the stock browser, used mostly by people who had not yet installed something they chose. It became a real product on 26 August 2014, when Google rebuilt it around the card layout it was using everywhere at the time and put it in the Play Store as a thing you could deliberately get. The iOS version followed on 7 October 2014.

What it did, it did at a scale that is easy to miss. It indexed over 65,000 sources and ran sixty country-specific editions in 42 languages, which is the part that mattered outside the United States. A news app with a Turkish edition was not a given in 2014, and the editions were separate in practice rather than a translated American front page.

The weather half was a widget at the top of the feed, tied to your location or to a city you pinned. It is in the name because in 2014 a news app was still expected to tell you whether to take a jacket, the way the front page of a newspaper did.

Google announced the end at I/O on 8 May 2018, though not in those words. Play Newsstand and News & Weather were being merged into one rebuilt Google News. Newsstand was described as being replaced. News & Weather was described as being discontinued, which is a different verb and turned out to be the accurate one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the eight days in between ~

Nobody at Google ever explained the 9 October reappearance. The app stopped working on the eighth and was back the next day, then ran for another week before being shut down again on the sixteenth. The most likely reading is a staged server-side rollout that got reverted, which is an ordinary engineering event that happened to leave the app serving news for another eight days after its own obituary date.

It is worth recording because the dating registers disagree about it. The Google graveyard sites carry 16 October. The detailed account carries 8 October with the revival noted after it. Both numbers describe the same shutdown, and a grave that picks one without mentioning the other is throwing away the strangest fact in the file.

~ what the merge was for ~

The 2018 Google News rebuild was an AI story in the way everything at that I/O was an AI story. The pitch was a briefing assembled for you rather than a list you sorted yourself, with publisher subscriptions handled inside Google rather than at each paper's paywall.

Running two separate news apps against that was indefensible, and one of them was a 2014-era card reader with a weather widget on it. The merge was overdue, and it still removed the only Google news product that had been designed country by country.

~ what a stock app is worth ~

The thing News & Weather proves is how much distribution a preinstalled app gets and how little that distribution is worth when it ends. It sat on millions of Android phones for years without most of those owners ever deciding to use it, and when Google withdrew it there was no community to complain and no archive project. An app you were given rather than one you went and found leaves nobody behind who feels robbed.

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