Why G Suite / Google Workspace sucks for personal use
I recently migrated everything to a personal G Suite /Google Workspace account, and I kept facing issues with Google’s services even though I’m in their ecosystem as a paying customer.
There are two main and very irritating issues:
- Removing services and data without any notifications whatsoever.
- Making it tedious and annoying to enable or try out new services.
I’ll list 3 examples of things that have irritated me quite recently.
Google Maps Timeline
Google Maps Timeline was a feature I was using, but was apparently suddenly disabled just for G Suite users in Saudi Arabia, it works just fine if you use a normal Google account from Saudi Arabia. All my Timeline history is gone, and when I contacted Google, they just told me to go ask on the Google Maps community forums.
Google Now
Google Now just doesn’t work out of the box, you need to go and fiddle with settings to get it to work.
Google News
I was excited to try the new Google News, but if I try to login with a G Suite account, I’ll be greeted with this error screen:
Using a normal Google account works just fine however. Since it’s recently been revamped, searching for the issue and how to get it working with G Suite is a fruitless effort. I’m sure we would need to wait for Google to add the setting, dig around for it, and enable it just like with Google Now.
Moving Forward
I will continue to use G Suite with Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar as it works really well there so far, but I will move away from it and back to a normal Google account until/if these issues are fixed. I honestly doubt if they ever will be, because G Suite for individuals doesn’t seem to be a popular thing anymore. It would be cool if I could somehow link my current G Suite with my normal Google account, so that if anyone is trying to reach me through a specific service I could just have that request go to my normal Google account. It’s also quite difficult to move all your data from one Google account to another, but I guess the only workable option is to have separate Google and G Suite accounts for separate things.
More Examples
June 2023
Fitbit users forced to use Google Accounts, but Google Workspace accounts are not supported (2023–06–14)
Recommendations
Updated on December 2018
Seeing as this article has been getting a lot of visits lately, I’ve decided to add these recommendations.
For personal use, I heavily recommend Zoho
