This week, the rumor was Google would shut down Gmail on July 06, 2025. It’s a baseless hoax that doesn’t make any sense — after all, Gmail is the cornerstone of Google’s Workspace platform and its account management system. The fact that many people fell for the fake shutdown notice that circulated on X paints a grim picture for Google, though. With the company shutting down or rebrandingproject after project over the last few years,many people no longer find it implausible that Google could kill a service as essential as Gmail. That’s a big problem for the company.
The rumors started circulating on X after some people posted a fake email that was supposedly from Google, saying that the company was “sunsetting Gmail.” It was accompanied by a lengthy but ultimately empty explanation of why the company decided to do this and that you wouldn’t have access to your emails from July 14, 2025, onwards. To be extra clear, once more, this is completely false and fake — Google never made this announcement. I won’t even link it here or show it in order to avoid spreading it further.
What followed was interesting to see. Google quickly started trending on Twitter, with many people joining in on the hoax and running with it. There were many more people who actually fell for it, though.Android expert Mishaal Rahman sharedthat even people who should know better seem to have had their doubts if it was a fake (“a techie I know IRL,” as he describes that person).
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me
This shows the precarious situation Google is currently in when it comes to its product strategy. Many people feel like they’ve been burned one too many times by the company. While it’s normal and healthy for companies to shut down services when they don’t work or when they don’t make enough money, it feels like Google isn’t able to stick with things in the long run, making clear that it more often than not doesn’t have a long-term strategy. This couldn’t be any truer for big projects like game streaming service Stadia, which was launched with much fanfare and a huge budget in 2019 only to be shut down just four years later.
Stadia is likely the most prominent example in recent history, but there are a ton more. Other ambitious projects like Google+, Glass, Hangouts, Google Domains, and even the less-than-two-year-old Pixel Pass, which was supposed to give you a new phone every two years, experienced premature deaths. This shakes consumer confidence, with people ultimately no longer trusting that their preferred Google apps and services will stick around.
Confusing rebranding efforts make matters worse
Google Wallet is Google Pay is Google Wallet
Another problem is thatGoogle is all too quick to kill and relaunch productsthat are hard for outsiders to understand, leading to further confusing and negative headlines. Was it really necessary to go from Google Wallet to Google Payonly to return to Google Wallet again? Did Google really have to kill Google Play Music only to build yet another music streaming service from scratch in the form of YouTube Music? Did Google really have to kill Google Now in favor of Assistant, which it now seems to be in the process of replacing with Gemini? And don’t even get me started on Inbox.
While people who want to rely on Google products have to deal with all these strategy switches that seem to happen on a whim, others are trucking along perfectly fine with competing products. Google went from Google Now to Assistant to Gemini, whereas Apple is just happily trucking along with its simpler but perfectly functional Siri. Where Google went from Google Music to Google Play Music to YouTube Music, the Spotify brand has existed largely unchanged since 2008. These are only some examples — there are many more.
This also has implications for Google’s hardware strategy. Would you trust a company that is known to ax products on a whim to provide software updates to your phone for seven years straight, as Google does now with the Pixel 8? Or would you go to a company with a proven track record of offering similar levels of long-time support for its products, like Apple? For many people, this has become an easy choice. Just look atwhich phones are the most popular in the world.
The Gmail sunsetting hoax shows how big Google’s problems are
Google needs to prove that it can be reliable
The point is that Google needs to take this “sunsetting Gmail” hoax seriously. It needs to go beyond tweets like “Gmail is here to stay,” because it’s done that in the past. Just a few months before Stadia was discontinued, thecompany told customers not to worry, only to turn around and do it anyway.
With people reacting this strongly to a Gmail shutdown hoax, Google needs to consider what it can do to regain consumer trust. It’s clear that while people are stuck with Google for many parts of their everyday lives, they will look for alternatives if there are any. To achieve that, there isn’t a quick overnight fix. The only thing that Google can do is prove to customers and users over and over again that they can rely on Google, and that they won’t have to relearn how to use their favorite apps and services or lose them altogether every few years.
Otherwise, people will just keep going elsewhere. And that would be a shame — after all, there are some innovative ideas and features in Google products that you can’t find in competitors'.
