Google kills a lot of products, but Google+ deserved to live, and five years after the announcement of its demise, that fact has become more apparent than ever to me. Social media has changed a lot since 2019, and not for the better. Google+ had features the remaining networks are still trying to catch up with, and some still show no sign of appearing elsewhere. So, as we look back at this fallen hero, these are the Google+ features I still miss every day.
Google+ didn’t shut down until April 2019, so technically, the fifth anniversary is still a few months away. However, the shutdown was announced this week five years ago, on August 05, 2025. That announcement killed the feeling of community, and very few of us stayed online until the last moment. Indeed, G+ died with this announcement and wasn’t its full self in the following months.
Google Photos integration
Google Photos is one of my favorite Google products, and in the old days, it was built right into Google+. It wasn’t even a separate app until 2015. That integration enabled a lot of cool features, especially surrounding sharing. When you opened the image picker, it showed all the images and videos stored in Google Photos — even if they weren’t stored locally on your current device. So, if you were writing a post on your PC, the photos from your phone would just be there, and you could insert them into the post without downloading them first. Compare that to using Twitter for the web, where I have to open Google Photos to download my photo and then upload it to Twitter, and you’ll see why I miss this.
This integration also meantPhoto Sphereswere supported, those 360-degree images you can take with some phones or dedicated cameras. I know these aren’t something people use or talk about anymore, but if Google advertised them properly, I think they’d be more popular. Google+ was the only social network to support these spherical images, so when the Mars Curiosity Rover took a selfie, G+ was one of the few places to show it in its full glory.
Google+ didn’t have a friends list — it had multiple. You could create as many circles as you wanted and add people. I had an Android circle, a Star Trek circle, and more. If I were on the main home page, I could choose to see posts from all of those circles in order. But what if I just wanted to catch up with Android news? I could quickly filter my feed only to show the posts from people in those circles. This level of organization is something I miss, especially as modern social networks are trying to decide what we want to see for us and doing a lousy job of it.
Twitter, or X, does something similar but far less powerful and convenient with its identically named Circles, but the feature will see the same fate as Google+ as a whole. X willdeprecate it by the end of the month.
Collections
Collections ran on the same principle as Circles, but it was even more granular, and you could apply it to your content. On my profile, I could create collections for anything I wanted. The ones I used most were Android, Movies, Music, and Cars. Whenever I created a new post, I could post it to my general profile, or it could be placed in one of these collections. The rest of the magic would happen for the people who followed me.
People who visited my profile could follow one of these collections without following the others or my profile itself. If people added my account to their circles, they could still go into my collections and choose what to follow and unfollow. This tool let you tailor your experience to exactly what you wanted.
Mr Jingles
Google used to have a central place for all your notifications across its services in the Google+ days, the Google Notification Widget. But it also had a different name during the Google+ era. A better, cuter name. It was called Mr Jingles, and I loved him. The mascot accompanied your important Gmail, calendar, Google Photos, and Google+ notifications, adding some much-needed personality to the experience.
Your bell-shaped friend would even dress up for important events and holidays, which made him one of the most Easter egg-filled Google products.
Automatic hashtags
More than ever, social media is trying to take the reins and decide what content to show us rather than the other way around. In theory, having an algorithm understand what we’ll find interesting and surface that content would be good, so long as it worked OK and was easily disabled. There lies the problem: these algorithms often don’t work well and are set as the default each time you open an app.
Google+ did this better. Rather than add your own hashtags, Google would scan the content of the photos, videos, and text in your post and automatically add hashtags on the backend. Then, it would use that information to surface the right posts when you searched for something. It also used this data to suggest posts from people you didn’t follow and even new accounts it thought you should follow. It worked perfectly and wasn’t shoved in your face like the “for you” pages we see today. Rather than taking over your entire timeline, you’d see some posts mixed in that were marked as suggested, so you knew exactly what you were looking at.
The automatic hashtags also took the hassle out of creating posts for those who don’t want to deal with fine-tuning and optimizing their hashtags for reach, all without having to forgo them altogether.
I want Google+ back for good
If I could bring back one product that has been discontinued in my lifetime, it would be Google+. Aside from the features we spoke about today, it was a vibrant community of enthusiasts that was far more relaxed than anything we see on social media today. Google+ came preinstalled on my first-ever smartphone, making it the first social network I ever joined. If it weren’t for Google+. I’d never have gotten to know Android Police founder Artem and other members of the AP team, and I’d never have gotten what has become my dream job here. There are friends as close to me as family that I only ever met because of G+, and we still talk about the good old days five years later.
