RIP to the Google Shopping app. XDA spotted a hidden lock message in the app on Thursday, and late on Friday, Google confirmed to 9to5Google that the Shopping app is on its way. Here is the statement from the company:
We will no longer support the Shopping app in the coming weeks. All the functionality that the app provided users with is available in the Shopping tab. We’ll continue to develop features on the Shopping tab and other Google platforms, including the Google app, to make it easy for people to discover and buy their favorite products.
The Google Shopping app only launched 19 months ago, when it took over from another Google Shopping closure, Google Express. The Google Shopping service has been a rough proposition to users – as of 2012, it was nothing but an ad vector showing only “paid listings” and no organic results whatsoever. This made sense as a service showing ads in small embedded boxes in Google.com search results, but it was unclear why a user would download an app that exclusively displays ads.
In April 2020, Google Shopping gave up the “paid listings only” policy and began listing anyone who signed up to the “Google Merchant Center”. The Merchant Center lets retailers generate and send a product data feed to Google, which is used for search results. This means that Google Shopping is still not a spider-driven search engine like Google Search. Google Search goes to great lengths to find, catalog and index the world’s data, while Google Shopping doesn’t shy away from indexing the web; it only cares about companies sending it data feeds. This can lead to woefully inadequate listings for some searches, especially for businesses that Google doesn’t like. For example, a search for “Amazon Echo” will never show a result from Amazon.com in the Shopping search results (However, Amazon is allowed to buy an ad).
Google’s statement says that the primary interface for Google Shopping will now be the shopping tab on Google.com, which again is rather odd for a product that isn’t an indexed organic search result. But Google Shopping has always been a weird product since Froogle’s death.