tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo’s) successor, google chat.
tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo’s) successor, google chat.
google’s messaging strategy has gotten so bad that they now have to remind consumers which of the apps are made for them. i myself had no clue that the google chat app in the play store was targeted towards consumers, i just assumed that the app was google workspaces only considering they always push rcs & that the play store description doesn’t go two sentences without talking about enterprise & google workspaces.
it’s kinda wild when you consider that they had a 17 year headstart on this & still somehow lost the messaging app/site race multiple times
I enjoyed using Hangouts. I still do. But the plethora of communication apps Google makes always give me chills that the judgement day is just round the corner. And by the time it arrives, it will just end up as another name on the list without much resort.
same, back ~2015-2018 i was hangouts’ biggest fan. now i avoid most google platforms in general aside from gmail, android & youtube. i can’t trust anything else to stay around anymore, & even when they do keep an app alive they end up just endlessly shuffling them around like this for no reason
I feel the same way used to love hangouts, tried allo. But at this point I don’t even use rcs because although it’s “open” no third party developers can make apps for it. Using matrix with bridges via beeper is how I integrate all my chats now and makes life way easier
Using Google apps used to be a smooth and seamless experience but it’s become a slog. The best you can hope for is that they’ll just stop supporting whatever service you like and just let it rot without updates for years while you are allowed to keep using it. Otherwise they’ll just force you to migrate around constantly while merging or fragmenting the experience until the former happens anyway.
It’s exhausting and it’s utterly destroyed my desire to check out anything new in their ecosystem.
It’s pretty hilarious how badly they’ve fucked this up. I have no interest in Google Chat at all because it’s almost certain they’ll replace it with yet another service before I even have a chance to settle in.
How long until they close down the Google Chat app and move to something else that is barely different?
probably about a week, give or take
This is Google’s biggest problem, I think. They’re so flaky on their products and services, I find myself not wanting to bother trying things out in case they don’t become popular enough for Google to maintain. I saw a lot of the same remarks about Stadia, and though I seem to remember Google assuring Stadia was playing the long game, well, we see how that played out.
Stadia really needed to be a monthly subscription model rather than asking people to buy games on Stadia.
Nobody wanted to buy in to a Google platform, but I might’ve signed up for a month and had a look.