They really should have just kept building on top of Hangouts.
From what I have read its simply not how Google works on the inside. They have all the best programmers developing new “products” which then get tested live. If a product wins great, put the best on something else. Maintaining existing products outside of the core search and ad’s is seen internally as a menial job, and managers focus on keeping maintenance costs low and quiet new ideas.
But yes, Hangouts was amazing at its peak. I could group chat, video chat, send MMS like posts, connect it directly to my google voice and more. They should have kept working on it.
I’ve heard that too, product launches = promotion so they keep churning them out.
I got curious and installed it there, Hangouts chats from 2015 - 2018 all appeared. This isn’t as brand new as they’d make you believe.
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There never was before. Alphabet’s internal HR metrics heavily weigh creating new products to maintaining new ones. There are a lot of times where the engineers that developed products are no longer on the dev team during launch.
I’ve always suspected that the reason Google keeps abandoning products is because they’re actually in it for the data. They’re not out to make a good RSS feed reader or a good music service, they’re interested in how people use feed readers or how people use music. Once they sucked all the data they wanted out of it they trash it.
There’s also data sources which they’ve never abandoned, like watching people’s location (baked into Android and Maps), or email, or photos, or files (Drive), and of course web search. Probably because the nature of this kind of data remains always relevant.
This is all very interesting for chat because they’ve been revisiting this product category so many times, trashing and re-doing chat clients in endless variations, as opposed to sticking to one or two (one for enterprise and one for regular people, for example). Not sure what that says about chat as a data source. Either it’s a particularly challenging category, or it keeps evolving so Google keep discovering new angles that are worth mining.
Supposedly the Android team is pretty fiercely firewalled from the rest of Google which is why it’s the only time with products that have any kind of longevity.
Google Chat is trash. It can’t beat Signal in terms of features and never will because Chat is by Google.
It would be a nice world were people only need 1-2 messaging apps. Google chats and iMessage. Yes I know that they are not open source and so need to be blindly trusted with our data.
I wonder how long this one will stick around for…
Might be a UK thing maybe but nearly everyone I know has switched to another sms app or turned off Rcs chat in messages.
I’ve never seen it work most times you’d send a message then be told about a day later it was undelivered. Sms needs to be instant waiting hours before you even know it wasn’t even sent is just plain unacceptable especially when nearly everyone has unlimited sms to begin with.
I’ve only used RCS a few times a my MIL has patchy data in her flat. The problem I have with it is that it’s baked into the same app as SMS, so you’re not really sure if you’re going to be sending an SMS or RCS message until you go into the chat and it says whether it’s available. And I don’t trust that it’s always going to work as RCS - I certainly don’t want it falling back to SMS if it fails.
With WhatsApp or Telegram, you know exactly what’s happening.
I think it’s meant to appeal to the US who I believe still use SMS a lot. If you’re still using SMS, I guess having it switch over to RCS is a bonus.
If you usually use WhatsApp, having a message go through as an SMS is a PITA.
I’m all in on Matrix, anything else has become irrelevant to me.
It feels like matrix is the answer to a something I considered a lot a few years back which is that it shouldn’t be on me, the sender, to know what messaging app the receiver would like to use. I should be able to send to some sort of message clearing house and then the receiver can elect the way they want to retrieve from that.
Is that about right?
It can be if there are enough clients supporting the Matrix protocol, as it currently stands though most people will just use Element the official client, and those big techs are mostly likely will never going to support it.
We can’t even get to a point where we have 3rd party apps supporting RCS on Android. I don’t really trust Google’s ability to deliver on and continue to support new products.
Can’t wait to see Google rename or kill Chat because it’s not gaining traction as expected.
Many have tried, many have failed.
You simply need a killer feature to get people to change.
whatsapp’s killer feature was “no killer features, just a messaging app with number-bound IDs and good UI that even my grandma can use with minimal setup”. for anything like that again I’d change, but the minute they think they need to add something like numberless IDs, or stickers, or a social media feature, or a payment system, they can fuck right off.
WhatsApps main “killer feature” was being early in the market to quickly reach a critical user mass.
Doesn’t matter which competitor, people will install an alternative, see that only 5-10% of their contacts have it and will immediately uninstall.
I see potential in preinstalled messaging apps. But it needs to be cross-compatible between iOS and Android. Otherwise it won’t fly.
WhatsApp killer feature was “No paying for SMS ever, just your data bills”, which was much lower than SMS fees in many many countries, which also explains the popularity of WhatsApp outside of the USA and in many Asian countries.
And it was tied to your phone number instead of a login ID, so anyone with a WhatsApp sign up could interact anyone else who had it, instead of having to find your contacts again like with a new IM service.
Google’s tried a few times. Allo, hangouts, and probably others.
It’s not a killer feature that they need, they need user base. There’s no reason for people to leave WhatsApp, as long as people can use it.
Here in Brazil, the only surges in Telegram popularity and actual usage where when WhatsApp was blocked countrywide, and even then we had several people downloading the shadiest VPNs out there just to log in on WhatsApp
Allo, mate
'Allo there, Duo.
Google shouldn’t be trying to push Chat as a WhatsApp and teams competitor. It’s hard enough getting people to adopt the normal Google Messages app.
Ideally google should push for a regulatory investigation into Meta for their market share of Messenger + WhatsApp.
Every year we see either messenger or WhatsApp at the top of communication tools in all countries apart from east and south east Asia.
Google fucked around too long for me to consider using any of their new services and I’m working on dropping the old. Got bit in the ass with Allo, Hangouts, GPM, Inbox, and latestly Domains, which I thought was safe.
Yeah getting dependent on any Google service is just a waiting game to handle catastrophe. That said I’ve yet to find a single semi-competent calendar widget in Android (month view most importantly) which keeps me. But as the legacy workspaces fiasco showed it’s only a matter of time until I’m forced to take action.
Business Calendar (com.appgenix.bizcal) has very good widgets.
This seems promising, I’ll check it out thanks!
Have you tried Proton’s calender? I’ve relied solely on it since its beta a couple of years ago.
When the workspaces-fiasco occurred I even signed up for Proton, but even as of today their only calendar widget is a glorified to-do-list for the current day. A shame really, I submitted feedback over a year ago for a widget with a monthly overview but alas. I get the feeling they’re very Google-like in that they pump out new features but hardly maintain/develop what’s already released.
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Wait, what happened with domains?
Got sold to squarespace
Google’s inability to stick with something despite its flaws and working on making it better over time, but instead constantly scrapping and renaming services is why I don’t bother investing in any of their experimental projects. Why should anybody waste their time getting used to something if google is just gonna ditch it after a while.
I miss Google Wave
