Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Friday that the number of users of its Google One subscription service has reached 100 million. Reaching this milestone highlights the company's efforts to get users to abandon free plans, such as discontinuing unlimited photo storage on Google Drive.
Google's YouTube Premium service took nine years to reach that milestone, but it also recently hit 100 million users, thanks to extra features like ad removal and music or high-quality streaming (at the same time, YouTube also made changes to combat ad-blocking plug-ins).
The company said it was approaching the $100 million mark when it released its fourth-quarter earnings last month and disclosed billions of dollars in layoffs, a point it mentioned again last week when it launched its advanced tier of AI plans.
The new AI plan is similar to the company's existing $100-per-month Google One Premium plan, which comes with 2TB of storage and other features like VPN and dark web monitoring, but is twice as expensive. Users can use an enhanced version of Gemini (the new name for Bard's chatbot) and will soon be able to use AI-generated features in services such as Gmail and Docs.
According to the troubleshooting section of the Google AI Premium registration support page, users cannot subscribe to the AI Premium plan via Apple App Store payments, so to subscribe, they must first cancel the plan. Additionally, it cannot be shared across homegroups.