Leaving G Suite (Premium)

When I moved my custom domain to Google years ago, I never imagined it would limit my access to the Internet. But it has. And I’ve finally had it: I’m reverting to a normal Gmail account.

This problem is pernicious, and it’s a bit hard to explain. But here goes.

Google, as you know, offers services like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and others to consumers for free: All you need to do is sign up for a Google account—with a gmail.com address—and you’re good to go. In fact, that gmail.com requirement is, in some ways, the primary difference between this offering and what Microsoft offers with its Microsoft account: Microsoft has offered multiple domains—hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, and outlook.com—over the years for whatever reason.

Google used to offer a way to open an account with a custom domain too. It was called Google Apps For Your Domain back in the day—it launched in 2006—and for a low fee of $50 per year, you basically had access to all of the same Google services, but via a custom domain like thurrott.com.

Technically, Google Apps was always about businesses, and in the beginning, it effectively targeted the smallest businesses only. You can see how a small local business might want to get online with their own brand and identity. This was a real problem a decade ago, and Google offered a simple and inexpensive way to make it happen.

Microsoft also used to offer a custom domain feature for its Hotmail and related services called Windows Live Custom Domains. For a time, my thurrott.com domain was tied to that service, but at some point, I switched it over to Google Apps for testing purposes. That was bad timing, as Microsoft shut down the ability to sign-up for new Windows Live Custom Domain accounts while I was doing so, stranding thurrott.com with Google.

(The rise—and subsequent fall—of Outlook Premium, which offered a consumer-focused way to use your custom domain with a public email service, was obviously of interest to me. But that is no longer an option. On a side note, I also use another custom domain with my Office 365 Business Premium account.)

Even before I moved to BWW Media and started thurrott.com as my primary website, I had transitioned to using [email protected] as my primary email. This makes sense: If you know my name, you know how to contact me. But Google Apps, like the commercial versions of Office 365, has evolved a lot over the past decade. And in 2016, it was rebranded to G Suite. Today’s G Suite bears little relation to the cute service that had debuted years earlier. G Suite is now as big, complex, and hard to use as Office 365 or any other enterprise-focused system. And it has been a constant frustration, on a number of levels.

Here, however, I will focus on just one of those problems. Because it has always been a problem. And the severity of this problem has become more and more acute over time. Just last night I finally realized what was really happening. And I must leave G Suite. I cannot use this service as my primary interface with Google’s services.

Google, as I noted, offers an array of services to Google account holders. The list of services it offers has grown—exploded, really—over the years, and while some way worry or complain about the privacy implications of aligning with Google, I feel that the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. And that you would be just punishing yourself by trying to make a vague point by limiting your exposure to Google.

But there are, in fact, two levels of Google services availability. There is the full meal deal, which all Gmail customers get. And then there is a far more limited set of services that Google provides to G Suite users. That paying customers get less is nonsense. But there it is.

Your access to Google services is limited in two ways when you use—and pay for—G Suite.

First, Google doesn’t bring new services to G Suite immediately, and sometimes it doesn’t do so at all. Instead, new Google services are provided only to Gmail users at launch. And then they may be offered to G Suite some time in the future.

Second, because G Suite is a managed environment in which you could have many layers of management above your users—remember, this thing scales from the smallest of businesses to enterprises—your organization could, through ignorance or deliberate action—block your access to certain services or features. We only have a few users with thurrott.com email addresses, but I could go into the Google Admin console right now and, say, turn off Google Maps support for everyone if I wanted. That’s how this thing is designed.

The thing is, I just want to use [email protected] as if it were a normal Gmail account. I want access to all Google services, and I want that access to be full and unrestricted. That is, I don’t just want Google Maps (or whatever) to be enabled for me, I want to use all of the features that Google Maps offers. But this is difficult or impossible because not all Google services are available to me. And in many cases, I don’t see full functionality even when they are available.

Let me give you a few specific examples.

Back in late 2015, I purchased a Google Nexus 6P and wanted to test Project Fi, Google’s innovative wireless carrier service. But when I went to sign-up for the then-new service, I discovered something that has been all-too-familiar: It was only available to Gmail accounts, not to G Suite/Google Apps customers.

So I signed up with my Gmail account. This was only a minor irritation, and it basically meant that any time I reset the phone that Project Fi would not automatically connect. Instead, I had to manually sign-in with my Gmail account. But this also meant that, on my PCs and devices, I had to be sure to sign-in to Google services with both accounts—[email protected] and my Gmail account—because I was using my custom domain day-to-day.

Honestly, this wasn’t completely horrible. But I was hoping for a more seamless experience, and in mid-2017, Google finally added G Suite support to Project Fi. So that’s how long it took: Almost two years. I finally opened a new Fi account with [email protected] and switched in fall 2017. It was actually a terrible, painful transition, and I had a bad customer service experience with Google. But it finally happened.

Over the past few years, I’ve also been testing Chrome OS and Chromebooks, and of course, I’ve done so with my custom domain, since that is the account where all my bookmarks and passwords are. But over the course of this testing, I kept noticing that certain Chrome OS features were not available to me. And some of them were truly curious: I could not sign-in to the devices using a PIN, for example. I had to type my full password every time.

In researching this, I discovered that there were arcane settings in the Byzantine Google Admin console for G Suite that were blocking certain features. And that others, like PIN sign-in, were simply not available. (Over time, Google added a phone proximity sign-in feature that made this easier: I could sign-in automatically to a Chromebook if my Android phone was nearby and signed in too.)

And that is when I started getting dark thoughts about G Suite. That is when I realized that Google was giving me less because I was using a G Suite account. And that no amount of fiddling with the Admin console, or researching individual features online, would work. There was just no way to configure this thing to turn on all Google services all the time, and onboard new services as they became available.

So I started testing something on Chromebook. What if I just signed in my Gmail account? Then, I could sign-in to my custom domain in apps like Google Inbox and Google Calendar to access the data I have there. Voila! This worked great. And even better, I suddenly had access to a ton of Chromebook features that I could never use—or could never figure out how to access—with my G Suite custom domain.

This experience got me thinking about switching back to Gmail. Yes, I’d have to keep using [email protected] for email and calendar. But maybe my Gmail account could become my “main” account with Google again, the way that I interact with most of Google’s services.

And then last night happened. And clinched the deal.

I was at dinner with my wife, and with my sister and brother in law, and we were discussing their coming trip to Germany. I was telling them that they should use Google Maps to “star” (the real term is “save”) locations that they intend to visit in the app, and then they can un-star (un-save) them as they visit each in turn. I do this every summer when we do a home swap, and I use these stars as a visual “to-do” list in Google Maps.

In fact, I’ve been doing this here in Pennsylvania since we moved. Based on conversations with family here and with people we meat out in the world, I’ve starred (saved) local places—restaurants, wineries, whatever—that I want to visit. And as we do visit those places, I un-star them.

They thought this was a fantastic idea. So my sister brought up her phone to see how it worked. And I was describing this to them, and looking at my own phone. You find a place—I selected the restaurant we were at—and tap its location on the map, and an informational slider comes up from the bottom, listing the name of the location, its rating, reviews, directions, phone number, and more. One of the items in the little toolbar is a Save (star) icon. Just tap that to save it, I told them.

When you do, the item will be marked as saved, and you will see it as a gold star on the map.

Then my sister said, “Oh I can put it in Favorites, Want to go, or Starred places … Or I can make a new list.”

“Sorry, what?”

She handed me her phone. And she had options on-screen that I did not have my phone. My pure Google phone.

On her phone, the Save icon wasn’t a star, it was a little bookmark graphic. And she could choose “how” to save it. On my phone, all I could do was “star” it. Huh. Same app. Different features.

So my wife and my brother-in-law brought out their phones. All of them had the same options as my sister: They could determine how they wished to save the location. Only I could not.

So we started debating why I was seeing something different. They all have Samsung phones. Could that be it? We never did figure it out.

I don’t really understand how my brain works, obviously, but I was sitting in the sunroom this morning reading the paper when it dawned on me.

It wasn’t my phone. It was my account.

So I jumped off the couch, grabbed my phone, opened up Google Maps, and signed in with my Gmail account. Yep. That was it: While using my Gmail account, I get all of the functionality, and I’m not limited to just “starring” a location. Same app, same phone, different options with different accounts.

Oh f@#k this.

Obviously, I went and looked at the Google Admin console for my G Suite account to see if there was some Google Maps feature I hadn’t turned on. And there isn’t: There are two Google Maps related services listed under “Additional Google services” in the console—Google Maps and Google My Maps—and both can only be toggled between ON and OFF. Both are, of course, ON.

So I’m done. To be clear, there is no way that I could have known that I was missing out on this particular feature, no way to know what other features I’ve been denied over the years. And even if there is some crazy way to enable them in that console, forget it. I’m done.

The transition back to Gmail begins.