To me, a chargeback is a 'burn the bridges' moment. If a company has wronged me to the point I'm prepared to do a chargeback, then I obviously don't want anything to do with that company anymore, and I welcome them to close my account since I will never do business with them again. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that has frustrated you to the point of doing a chargeback?
I hear you, but Google is a giant dominant player. Just because their third party cell phone hardware service contractor loses a phone doesn't mean someone doesn't still need to use them for email or cloud computing services.
It's the lack of a central, accountable point of contact for everything under the "Google Account" that's the real problem. Since its very beginning Google has been bad at consumer relationships.
Maybe I'm reading this too negatively, but I just view it as their cost for not having a streamlined process and that it is just part of the transaction. It is one of the main reasons I use a credit card. If a company takes my money and reserves my room at a hotel and I show up at 2am, I expect access to the room. If they don't, I request my money back in person for services not rendered. If they cannot do it right then and there, I just tell them I'm going to chargeback because I don't really trust a company that took my money in the first place to return it in a timely manner. This happened to me in 2022 and I still plan to stay at that hotel chain. Just a rare occurrence for which they paid.
The problem is that Google is a conglomorate. You might be disappointed with their phone service or their phone store or their tv service or whatever and never want to do business again with that section of the company, but still want to keep using other parts. Maybe that sours you on the whole company, maybe not, but even if you don't want to end your ties with them, you probably want to end it on your terms, not immediately as you get your money back.
Google no. I am very very close to being able to kill my google account though I probably will just leave it parked.
Believe it or not Google Voice is the one thing holding me at the moment. Nobody offers the same quality service period, let alone free. Come at me HN, I'm open to alternatives. Google Voice also has one killer feature nobody else has; the ability to make and receive calls using your carrier voice service and not DATA. Generally a higher quality connection that on most plans these days is unlimited, where as a lot of plans still count data usage whether it's a "unlimited" (but throttled) account or not.
OpenPhone is the closest I've found and seems their customer service is horrible, I see people on reddit complaining about them all the time.
Google Voice is the only service I don't have a good replacement for either. I pay for Youtube TV (cable streaming) because it has the best price/value proposition for my viewing habits but there are a half dozen other services I could switch to and be happy.
I still have a shared calendar on Google but only because I can't convince my wife to try something different. I used to be all-in on Google but have spent the past 2 years getting away as much as I can.
Maps was my killer app for google. Early on I started with TomTom on a PDA, but Google maps for years was the absolute best. Until all the blatant ads showed up. First every McDonalds is visible at far zoom levels. Then garbage I don't want starts showing up in search results. Viewing your travel history is mildly disturbing and even if you delete it you just know it's already been data mined.
I hear OSM has some decent map and navigation solutions now, but for me Apple maps long ago passed the touring test. I only trust that Apple with all their positions and statements on privacy will suffer irreparable harm if it is discovered they sell user behavioral data like google blatantly does.
Sometimes you have little choice⁰, sometimes there are convenience¹² issues.
My point is that to avoid even having to consider this choice to make by never doing anything that I might ever want to charge back. Separation of concerns: don't do (significant) money stuff with Google, then money stuff can't affect your other uses of Google.
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[0] Some have a lot of contacts who know them at their @gmail address, getting people to update your contact info when you deliberately change address can be enough of a faf, imagine having to do it without warning. Some also have other accounts where they login via Google, they need to make sure those are transferred to something else (if possible).
[1] I have nothing irreplaceable in Google's sphere (my phone contacts & other content is backed up there, but not only there) though there are a few shared photo albums and so forth that I interact with using that account.
[2] Even if you intend to move away from Google or other large multi-pie-fingered company, and are actively doing so, you want to do that at your conveniences not with them chucking you out in an automated hissy-fit.
My takeaway from that is to never spend more than a few quid (i.e. money I'd care about losing) on anything linked that directly to Google.