9 ms·

I know these will be preinstalled on Android, but many friends and family use iOS and I will feel silly asking them to install Duo and Allo. Hangouts is able t

• dingo_bat 10y ago
  > Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.
  • karma_vaccum123 10y ago
    So why can't it be fixed?
  • Nullabillity 10y ago
    At least it doesn't only run on Apple devices, like the complete joke that is FaceTime.
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    • jsmthrowaway 10y ago
      [Here lies a substantive question that was posed to a content-free comment. Edit lasts longer than delete, so you now get to read its depressingly gray tombstone. Let's reflect together on this.]
      • izacus 10y ago
        That's a very strong defense of a piece of software that deliberately prevents you from communicating with people that haven't bought the same piece of electronics. Think on that for a moment - "Sorry grandmama, I can't send you iMessage or talk to you in person since you didn't spend your pension on an expensive Apple device." For something as fundamental as human-to-human communication, closed, single vendor, protocols and systems deserve every criticism (and yes, Google deserves it as well).
        • deleted 10y ago
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        • tkubacki 10y ago
          In theory...in reality when it comes to Apple HN crowd has double standards (eg. see snarky comment on "closing date" at top and try to imagine such a comment on Apple not being downvoted here)
      • deleted 10y ago
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    • stephenr 10y ago
      When it comes to shitty interoperability, Google takes the cake. No one ever claimed FaceTime works on your android. They wanted to open source it and got fucked on patents. Try using gmail to send a regular iCalendar format invite to an event. If they just happen to have used that email for a google account, fuck you it ends up in the Google calendar account they likely didn't know they even had, and never goes to their email. THAT is unexpected, and arguably deceptive behaviour.
      • ethanbond 10y ago
        Is there any more info on trying to open source FaceTime? I've never heard of this before and seems interesting.
        • stephenr 10y ago
          Jobs said it at the keynote when FaceTime was announced. They never managed to follow through, and ultimately had to change the way FaceTime works, because of a lawsuit by a patent troll.
          • izacus 10y ago
            Apple, richest company on the world, couldn't pay for a patent on their chat protocol to make it open? :/
          • deong 10y ago
            But they did do the work to circumvent the patent. "Patents" can't logically be the reason FaceTime isn't an open standard today. I doubt they ever were. Apple simply realized that FaceTime was an effective sales driver for iOS hardware and wanted to keep that competitive advantage more than they wanted to follow through on Jobs's promise.
            • aljones 10y ago
              The patents forced them to route through their own servers instead of peer to peer. Seems like a logical reason not to make that an open standard to me.
    • simonh 10y ago
      You'll need to explain that, I genuinely don't know what you say it. Facetime is just a feature. It's a calling option in contacts and any phone call to another iPhone can be turned into a facetime call at the push of a button. That means you don't even need to think about it. There's no install process, no configuration, no account to set up, it's just there. Furthermore because it can rely on guaranteed hardware features it has the best compression, bandwidth utilization and image quality in the business. If it's a joke, I'm not sure who it is that's doing the laughing.
      • basch 10y ago
        there is an account and you do need to be signed into it in settings. if you don't sign in when you setup the phone, you separately need to sign into: app store, icloud, imessage, facetime, etc
      • Nullabillity 10y ago
        It is a service, I don't see why it being integrated into some other app should matter. It works for calling people who bought from the same brand as you, it doesn't work for the rest of people, and it pretends to work (WTF?) for people who used to have the same brand as you. That's a very different bar from just needing to install an application.
  • tmsam 10y ago
    I only started using Hangouts a few months ago, and find the macOS experience acceptable and think the iOS implementation is dead on.
    • spacemanmatt 10y ago
      I started using it lot more in the past year, mainly since it hits every platform my kids, parents, and ex use. Which is all of them, at any given moment. Being the family techie, I was the only one to note that we were virtually limited to 1 or 2 choices.
  • thomasahle 10y ago
    Hangouts has always worked a lot better for me than Skype and Facebook video chat. Both on Android and desktop.
    • vanderZwan 10y ago
      Doesn't it use VP9? Tends to kill hardware acceleration, so very battery draining. But aside from that it has generally been way more reliable for me too.
    • ergo14 10y ago
      Same here, hangouts is one of best working solutions for me and my family on variety of devices and operating systems.
  • maruhan2 10y ago
    i think it's more that skype and facetime are amazing
  • vmateixeira 10y ago
    The fact that it needs a browser plugin in order for the video/voice features to work doesn't help either.
• lern_too_spel 10y ago
  Worse, now I have to find my friends' phone numbers. Is this targeted to people in developing countries who use apps like WhatsApp? Those people don't have fast enough mobile internet to make video calling work.
  • tonfa 10y ago
    WhatsApp is not specially an emerging market product, I think it is the most popular chat app in a bunch of European countries.
    • wutbrodo 10y ago
      Yea I think the US is definitely an outlier there; Out of the couple dozen countries I've visited recently outside of the US, Whatsapp seems like hands-down the most popular messaging app (whereas in the US, almost no one I know uses it unless they're in frequent contact with a non-trivial number of foreigners).
      • gst 10y ago
        A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. In lots of other countries you pay several cents for each individual text message and MMS cost several tens of cents. And this is for domestic messages. With international messages (which you often use because you're country is likely to be much smaller than the US) the costs are often insane and can reach more than a dollar per message. Basically providers in those countries stopped competing with apps like Whatsapp. They still offer a texting service, but they're not trying to get someone to use it, because they already lost the battle.
        • SlashmanX 10y ago
          SMS' can be free in a lot of European countries, the main difference is that MMS didn't really take off in Europe as much as it did in the US so they usually cost more. Also since people weren't that attached to MMS, it was easy to 'replace'
• darklajid 10y ago
  Ignoring that I probably won't use this (no fan of of that company), if it doesn't require a weird setup it might be more accessible than Hangouts. At least last time I checked Hangouts required you to join G+ first? Is that still the case?
  • JoshTriplett 10y ago
    No, Hangouts doesn't require G+. You can use it via Android or https://hangouts.google.com/ https://hangouts.google.com/ without joining G+.
  • Navarr 10y ago
    Duo only requires phone number (and that you periodically send your contacts to Google) Allo I think will be the same - they're transitioning to phone # based auth instead of Google account auth so that using a Google account is not a limiting factor.
• wutbrodo 10y ago
  Google's communications strategy has been bafflingly dumb for years and years now. Almost my ENTIRE social network (that was on chat; this was before every part of society was "on the Internet") used to be on Gchat. That's a massive network-effects advantage that they had ages before anyone else did (including Facebook, but Facebook's network did surpass them with the ability to find someone by their face). Almost a decade of inexplicably stupid product decisions later, they've squandered their hugely valuable lead (and then some). I can't imagine why anyone would go out of their way to use any Google product whose usefulness is at all dependent on network effects (I've completely ignored the launch of Allo and Duo and, years after everyone else, have pretty much moved to FB Messenger as my primary messaging app). This is a pretty chronic Google problem that I noticed both from the inside and outside: their engineering and design talent are incredible, but the people responsible for the product and marketing side are evidently really, really bad at what they do. This is part of why products like GMail or Google Search do so well, and products like G+ so poorly: you could be the only person in the world using GMail and it would be just as useful (and well-designed), while the quality of products like G+ depend less on their quality _per se_ and more on network effects, which Google's product/marketing is clearly too incompetent to do well.
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Also, Google Search and Gmail were REALLY GOOD back when Google made really good products, and they both seem to be treated as sacred there. Neither has received truly radical changes to fit with Google's new and often transient business focuses. Had Google made the mistake of replacing Gmail with Inbox, Gmail would've gone the way of everything else Google's done lately. But it seems like someone rightfully has ensured the two "big ones" stay largely unmolested.
    • dredmorbius 10y ago
      If anything, both Google Search and Gmail have received negative changes. I've been using DDG for years, though I'll return to Google Web search periodically (Books and Scholar I use more often). It's nagware that's begging me to make it my default browser (no, you blew through that trust relation ages ago, sweetheart), and long before then stopped providing actual usable URL links in favour of its craptacular redirects. On desktop I've got a demungifier script I can run those through, on Android, if I see those, I remember why I don't use Google Web search, abandon it, and return to DDG. Google News, in a moment of major irony, fails to work at all on Chrome/Android. The company lost its soul a long time ago. It's been losing its mind for some years now.
• ajscanlan 10y ago
  Haven't used an iPhone in over a year but isn't this the same on iOS with Facetime and iMessage? One for video calls one for text messages?
• thedangler 10y ago
  The one thing I hate about hangouts and I could never figure out how to change was when searching for someone to text. It would search googles list of people with google+ and not my contact list first. Random people I don't even know named Mark, for example, would show up for me to text. Still makes no sense to me. I'm on iOS.
  • kzisme 10y ago
    This is the most infuriating thing...now I just go through my contacts to find who I want to message (since their number exists but selecting SMS still brings up "On Hangouts")