Google has a reputation for not being shy about killing its darlings. Many people are still disgruntled about a plethora of wonderful services the company discontinued over the years, be it the future of emailing in the form of Inbox, the social network Google+, or the excellent RSS feed aggregator Google Reader.

While you might think that the company calmed down a bit over recent years and is currently killing off fewer services, you could be surprised that Google actually sunset as many as 25 services this year alone — on average, that’s more than two kills every month.

If you’re curious about what the company has been up to this year, here’s a quick summary.

December 31: AngularJS

2010 - 2021

The last service to be killed this year shall be the first in this reverse-chronological list. You may not have heard about AngularJS (short for Angular JavaScript), but it’s an open-source framework for building web apps which has been used by millions of developers all around the world. The good news is that all these people aren’t going to be left standing in front of the ruins of the service, as it lives on as Angular, without the JS in its name — after all, it’s become much more than just a JavaScript-focused resource.

December 20: Museletter

2021 - 2021

The second service in line, Museletter, is probably the record-setting one. It’s pretty much the most short-lived service Google has ever introduced. The company’s Area 120 team launched it as an experimental service for newsletter creation and it never even lived long enough to become a tool you can actually use. The only thing Museletter ever maintained before it was shut down was a waitlist of people interested in trying out the service.

December: Google Toolbar

2000 - 2021

You may not be old enough to remember Google Toolbar, but it was a super-handy tool back in the days when Internet Explorer was the dominating browser across the globe and the company's oldest service to be retired this year. The add-on added incredibly valuable features to the browser like a search box right below the address bar, a popup blocker, and built-in Google Translate support. These days, this functionality is deeply embedded into all popular browsers, but back then, tools like popup blockers were cutting-edge technology.

Google Toolbar Internet Explorer

Shortly before its demise, Ars Technica did a hands-on with the toolbar that was already largely dysfunctional at that time. Be sure to check out our high-level overview of what the publication found out.

October 15: Google My Maps app

2014 - 2021

Let’s preface this one with an important distinction: The Google My Maps Android app is dead, but the My Maps web service lives on. While you won’t be able to create custom maps with your own waypoints and routes via an Android app anymore, you can always still head to the website to do the same. The custom creations can still be viewed via the Google Maps app on Android and iOS, for what it’s worth.

September 30: Google Bookmarks

2005 - 2021

No, Google hasn’t silently killed off bookmarks in Google Chrome this year — you would have probably noticed that. Instead, the company bid farewell to Google Bookmarks, its web-based bookmarking service that was tightly integrated with some other Google services like Maps. For example, Bookmarks held on to your saved places in the map app, but don’t you worry, even though Bookmarks is dead, your saved places are securely stored in Maps. If you’re still confused, read our deep dive where we unwind the whole topic.

September 27: Chatbase

2017 - 2021

You probably haven’t heard about Chatbase, and there’s no shame in admitting that. It was an analytics platform for Google’s Dialogflow chatbot, a service that lets app developers integrate conversational user flows in their apps. If you’ve already snoozed away, I can’t blame you; it’s not like it’s a super high-profile consumer product, even if everyone has probably run into some automated business chat tool when reaching out to support. Chatbase has been partially merged with Dialogflow itself, so at least it lives on in a sense.

July 30: Fitbit Coach and Fitbit Yoga

2013 - 2021 / 2014 - 2021

Google acquired Fitbit back in 2019, and two years later, it’s time for spring cleaning. Fitbit Coach and Fitstar Yoga were both folded into Fitbit Premium this year in July. Coach used to be a video-based standalone body-weight workout app, with some form of machine learning taking care of personalizing your sessions. Fitstar Yoga was similar, but as the name implies, it’s focused on Yoga.

Fitbit Premium moves the features from these two apps right into the main Fitbit app, and it offers even more functionality, like meditation guides, nutrition plans, and further insights into your fitness level thanks to data incurred from your Fitbit devices.

July 15: Tour Builder

2013 - 2021

Tour Builder was a service that allowed you to build interactive tours complete with images and videos inside of Google Earth. It has been deprecated in favor of Google Earth’s built-in creation tools, with big parts of it living on inside the newly created Projects in Google Earth.

June 30: Expeditions and Tour Creator

2015 - 2021 / 2018 - 2021

You’ll find Google Cardboard itself further down in this list, but Expeditions is part of the fallout of that project’s demise. Expeditions was a VR platform developed for educational purposes. It allowed students to take virtual field trips to various places, with the most prominent being the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Korea.

Google Arts and Culture Exhibitions

The other part of the service, Tour Creator, has also been killed off. It’s the tool that allowed you to create these Expeditions in the first place, giving teachers, institutions, and anyone who is interested the opportunity to create a tour of their own.

At least Google hasn’t killed off these experiences altogether, as they live on in Google Arts & Culture. They’re available under the same Expeditions name there.

June 30: Poly

2017 - 2021

If you’ve never heard of Google Poly before, don’t worry — the service hasn't exactly made waves in the general public after it was launched in 2017. Poly, as in polygon, was a repository for 3D objects. Users could upload and display their projects in a full 3D environment, and artists could add licenses for their creations to help others figure out how they can use artworks.

June 15: Google Play Movies & TV

2011 - 2021

Okay, this one is complicated, but hey, this is Google we’re talking about, and we all know how bad it is at branding. Google Play Movies & TV was replaced by Google TV a while back, which is essentially still what it was before — a platform to purchase movies and TV series. But Google TV can also be used as a content aggregator for streaming services, giving you an overview which shows and movies are available as part of which of your subscriptions, making it more useful than its predecessor — if only Netflix didn't decide to not join the platform.

Play Movies and TV becoming Google TV

Interestingly enough, this isn't the route all devices will go. Third-party manufacturers like Roku, Samsung, LG, and Vizio will point to the YouTube app instead, where you can also purchase films and shows. Oh, Google.

And Google TV isn’t just the replacement for Play Movies & TV. The name is also used for the new Android TV launcher/homescreen that first debuted on the titular Chromecast with Google TV. And to make matters even worse, Google TV is also the company’s deprecated operating system for smart TVs, the predecessor to Android TV. Not confusing at all, no.

Did we mention there’s also YouTube TV?

June 8: Measure

2016 - 2021

Measure was one of the most practical apps showcasing Google’s AR platform ARCore (now Google Play Services for AR). It allowed you to make relatively accurate measurements using nothing but your phone’s camera. While it initially only supported horizontal measurements, a later update refined it to work in vertical environments, too.

For some history, Measure originally launched as an app for Google’s Project Tango, a complicated multi-camera device that was supposed to improve AR beyond what phones back in 2016 were capable of. With the introduction of ARCore, there wasn’t any need for specialized hardware anymore, as Google was able to emulate a lot of the capabilities in software. That’s also when Measure made its way onto regular phones.

June 1: Zync Render

2014 - 2021

You’re forgiven if you’ve never heard about Zync Reader as it was a developer-focused platform. It was a cloud rendering service for animation and visual effects acquired by Google in 2014. Zync was used in many high-profile films, like American Hustle, Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, and Star Trek: Into Darkness, but with cloud-based rendering having become more accessible and easier to pull off for other businesses, Google probably didn’t see the need to maintain the platform any longer.

May 31: Timely

2013 - 2021

Let’s take a trip down the memory lane, back to the good old Google Nexus und #holoyolo days. Back in 2013, Google acquired the gorgeous Timely Alarm Clock, an innovative and beautiful app that supported cross-device syncing. Following the acquisition, development stalled more and more, and eventually, in 2021, it was time to kill off the service, including its account syncing servers.

Google likely bought the app for the brains behind it, with these people probably working in different parts of the company these days, if they’re still at Google at all.

April: Google Shopping (the app)

2019 - 2021

Hold your horses — Google Shopping isn’t dead. The only thing that was killed off in April 2021 is the Google Shopping Android app, which offered a native experience and a personalized homepage for all shoppers. Big chunks of the service live on as part of the Google Shopping website, which is pretty much on par with the app.

March 31: Google Public Alerts and Google Crisis Map

2012 - 2021 / 2011 - 2021

Google Public Alerts was a dedicated service for warning a country’s population in case of any severe and extraordinary circumstances, like weather watches and safety instructions. While the dedicated service and its website have been killed off, the core functionality lives on on Google Search and Maps, continuing to warn the public in case of an emergency.

In a similar vein, Google Crisis Map was a service that allowed authorities and anyone else to create layered maps that “help people find timely, authoritative, and actionable information during a crisis, on Google Search and Maps,” according to Google. The website has been replaced by a combination of other services that Google recommends to use in case of an emergency — Google My Maps, Google Earth, and Google Maps.

2010 - 2021

Google Go Links was one of various link shortening services and was also known as Google Short Links. It supported custom domain names for Google Workspace/G Suite customers, and got 11 years old. It looks like it hasn’t been used much when it was finally killed off, as even the Killed by Google website couldn’t find further details on the discontinuation of the service.

March: Google Cardboard

2014 - 2021

We already talked about Cardboard a bit in relation to other services killed by Google this year, but Cardboard was probably the product to make VR mainstream. First introduced in 2014, it was nothing but a low-cost cardboard box with lenses that you could fold into a VR viewer with your smartphone inserted. When placed just right, it could be used as the easiest form of entry into the world of VR, without requiring any further peripherals.

These days, VR technology is far more advanced than that, and Google has given up on this low-cost form factor.

February: Swift for TensorFlow

2018 - 2021

This one is pretty deep in the weeds if you’ve got nothing to do with programming, so buckle up. Swift for TensorFlow was an experiment that aimed to combine Apple’s Swift language with the Python-based machine-learning TensorFlow open-source library. In simpler terms, it was supposed to make it easier for anyone using Apple’s Swift programming language to create machine-learning applications. Many parts of the modular project still live on in Swift and TensorFlow, and the archived Github repository will remain visible for anyone interested in the topic.

February: Tilt Brush

2016 - 2021

Tilt Brush was one of Google’s funnest VR applications, and the good news is that it lives on as an open-source project. The service allows anyone to create 3D artwork in a virtual environment, allowing them to experiment with novel possibilities enabled by the three dimensional canvas.