August 4, 2012

No More Mobile iGoogle

Last month, Google announced that iGoogle will be discontinued next year. Few people noticed a help center article which informed users that "the mobile version will be retired on July 31, 2012".

The mobile iGoogle site no longer works, even if the iGoogle link is still included on the homepage. "As Google announced in early July, iGoogle's mobile version has been retired," mentions a Google employee. Unfortunately, you can't even use the desktop iGoogle site on a mobile device without changing the user agent. You can do that in the mobile Chrome for Android and iOS or in the stock Android 4.0+ browser by visiting www.google.com/ig and selecting "request desktop site" from the menu.




Google suggests users to try mobile apps and add widgets to the home screen if they have an Android device. There are all kinds of apps for weather, news, mail, unit conversion, translation, but the nice thing about iGoogle is that everything is displayed on a single page you can could access from any device. The "Google Now" feature from Android Jelly Bean could replace the mobile iGoogle once Google adds more cards.

8 comments:

  1. Weird to quit this project, I'd have thought iGoogle was the easiest of the Google suite to sustain - just a HTML frame with basic jscript and the widget authors take care of the rest?!

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  2. Well, it wasn't userful anyway. Thank you, Google.

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  3. "the nice thing about iGoogle is that everything is displayed on a single page you can could access from any device."

    If you're looking for a replacement checkout Skim.Me at (http://skim.me).

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  4. Hoping for new ways in which Google's technology asks us to express ourselves.

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  5. Greedy corporations! If it cost a million to make a billion,they think that's to much. For the most part, I'm already using netvibes.com You can use widgets on msn.com too.

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  6. Man, this is a bummer. Went to access my grocery list on iGoogle on my phone today (which I keep in a to-do app), and no iGoogle to be found. iGoogle is great for productivity--hate that they're killing it.

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  7. iGoogle was not very handy to me, but hopefully they replace the same with something better for the rest of the users.

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  8. Bad decision Google. I'm now looking for alternatives. Will you be killing Gmail next?

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