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Google Nearby Notifications

Local recommendation service
Google Cemetery

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GENERAL INFORMATION
Category:
Travel
Started:
2015
BUSINESS FAILURE
Cause:
Poor Product
Closed:
2018

Don't be the average security professional that spends 4,300 hours annually to maintain compliance. Simplify your audits and reduce your workload with G2's 5-star rated compliance automation platform.

Get started →

Description

Nearby Notifications was a service Google launched in 2015. It aimed to provide users with notifications on useful apps and websites based on their location.

For example, users received messages about free WiFi nearby or a coffee-delivery app. They could get museum guides, or even when the next bus would arrive.

Google Nearby Notifications

Cause of Failure

In theory, the service should have allowed users to get frequently updated on what’s around them. In practice, however, the app turned out to be a way for marketers to spam people. A lot of businesses were promoting themselves by pushing messages to people non-stop.

That caused an ever-growing number of people to seek a way to disable the feature. All this led to Google’s decision to discontinue the service. In October 2018, they announced that the app failed to meet the company quality standards, and the result was a poor experience for users. Because of this, Nearby Notifications was shut down on December 6, 2018.

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