Google has started advising that from April 10th, they will no longer save shopping lists created from Assistant to Keep.
Ahhh Google, how you love to fracture, replicate and confuse your product offerings. It seems someone from the Google Assistant team either got transferred from or had lunch with someone from Google’s messaging division/s because they have decided to pull their shopping LIST out of their lists app and put it in a different app where there currently aren’t any lists.
When Assistant launched you could ask Assistant to add anything you wanted to a shopping list, this item would appear in Keep, where Google keeps their lists, under the heading “Google Assistant shopping list” this makes sense. If you go into your assistant list in Keep now you’ll be greeted with this.
If you follow the link you’ll end up on a Google Support page explaining that Assistant’s shopping list will now be moved to both the Google Home App and the Google Express App. Why? It’s likely an attempt, after announcing Google Express shopping through Home/Assistant earlier this year, to move entice users into using Google Express to make that transaction more apparent.
Of course Google Express is only available in the continental United States, meaning it’s not even available everywhere you can officially use Assistant so that’s a lot of people being disadvantaged in the attempt. So, for everyone outside the US we will get our lists moved into the Home app to make this look like anything other than a commercial decision.
When the list moves to Home or Express, all of the current contents will move over and any people you are sharing the list with will also be moved over. Of course, I now need to convince my wife to install and use another app. We use keep for more than just Shopping lists (or at latest we currently do, see below), so with this decision it adds another layer of adoption to what is arguably one of Google Homes best features.
The update is scheduled to rollout on Monday, the 10th of April so we’ll check back on the Home app then to see how this integration works. You would think that Google would have Learnt their lesson with Google Plus, in that forcing users to use a specific product to promote it isn’t ever a good idea. Hell, just give us the option of switching back, call me crazy but I like my lists in the list app.
To be honest I was hoping that Google would roll back their shopping list functionality via Assistant. In the old days (ie befoe Assistant) of Google Now when you added something to a list, you had the option of specifying which list. You could say “Ok Google, add fix fence to repairs list”, this would add the task of “fix fence” to a list I had of repairs I would promise to, but never actually, do!!
With this latest move, my hopes are all but dashed as it looks like Google is choosing the potential increase in sales from their home delivery service over actually delivering a great digital Assistant service.
What do you think of list being moved out of Google’s list app?
