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by dkjaudyeqooe 1616 days ago
A fair settlement of this would be to allow users to continue using their existing domain names with the accounts striped down to the same functionality as a free Gmail account and associated service access. Unused user slots would be taken away as would administrator access.

How would that hurt Google besides taking away a modest revenue raising opportunity?

Edit: just to be clear, your account essentially becomes a gmail account that happens to have a custom domain name.

4 comments

I believe there is a technical challenge they are not willing to overcome. My Google Apps account has long had broken integrations with almost all of the "new" google services. There is also a limitation in that you can't join a family group using a Google apps account, so I'm forced to have a regular gmail account anyways in order to participate in that.
I believe the limitation stems from the fact that Google Family uses the same underlying mechanism in Android as Mobile Device Management that's part of Workspace. I once managed to create an account that was simultaneously in Google Family AND in Google Workspace, but the end effect were constant notifications in Android that the account has joined Family, then deleted from Family, this several times a minute.
You'd still need some sort of administrator access, so you can remove accounts on your domain.
That would be the same process as deleting a Gmail account.
I mean, I would need an administrative panel to add or delete accounts in my domain, basically.
> allow users to continue using their existing domain names with the accounts striped down to the same functionality as a free Gmail account and associated service access

That would give them MORE features and services.

Probably more like the old legacy Google accounts that you could make with any email address before gapps exited.
These still exist and you can still create one today from the new account flow, by clicking the option to use your own email address when they ask what Gmail address you'd like.

This would seem to be a viable model for ex-gapps accounts, although a regular "non Gmail Google account" still has access to Google calendar and drive and other tools that ex-gapps users seem to be denied access to. That becomes an interesting disparity.