10 ms·

So now google has Voice, Messenger, Hangouts, Allo, and Duo all with overlapping functionality? I wish they would just focus on making Hangouts work really well

• berfarah 10y ago
  I think the way they see it is: Voice is basically deprecated Hangouts is enterprise Allo and Duo compete with Whatsapp/iMessage and Facetime/Skype respectively
  • 77ko 10y ago
    Not quite: - Facebook Messenger combines all the functionality of Allo and Duo. - Whatsapp already has voice calling and is adding video soon (so I read on the internet) - iMessage and Facetime integrate in IOS much better than Google Duo does. In IOS, you go to a contact and press facetime. On Android, you go to a contact... then go back out to Duo and call them. WeChat, of course, does everything that all these apps will ever do - as of many years ago.
    • floopidydoopidy 10y ago
      I feel like ICQ 98 was the pinnacle of chat applications. Floating contacts and email style messages... brilliance.
      • wingerlang 10y ago
        > email style messages Care to elaborate? I'm having trouble picturing what you mean. Long form with styling?
      • the_other 10y ago
        The "find random chat partner" feature was so addictive!
      • ashark 10y ago
        Strongly agree. It's still unsurpassed. And it worked well on systems with 64mb of RAM (maybe even less) without stomping all over the rest of the programs you were running. Seems like no-one can even "Hello World" a desktop app these days without a 100mb download and requiring several hundred MB of memory all to itself.
    • naviehuynh 10y ago
      you can call/message a person from contact page directly, I have done that with whatsapp
    • joosters 10y ago
      I was visiting China recently and started using WeChat... it really is far ahead of other messaging apps, the amount of integration with other services is staggering (many shops offer payment through the app, QR codes to link to WeChat are commonplace, even my hotel advertised its wifi settings through WeChat!) I wonder if WeChat will try to push the service more outside of China?
  • riffraff 10y ago
    but hangouts lacks things which are useful for enterprises such as video recording (it's possible only if you make a "hangout on air", afaiu) and, in my experience, screen sharing text/code is painful because of the video encoding making it unreadable. To me hangouts looks like a competitor to Skype only, at this time.
    • rahoulb 10y ago
      Hangouts on air is being replaced by Youtube Live
  • pmontra 10y ago
    Duo competes with Facetime, except it's not integrated in Contacts and I can't imagine why. Duo and Facetime don't compete with Skype because they don't have the IM part which is a very important component of Skype. I used it for all these years as an IM client (business or friends), less as audio and rarely as video. But video is always the least used form of communication. Still I'd like to see some global usage stats of Skype: minutes by chat, voice, video. My customers, friends and I could be the outliers.
  • threeseed 10y ago
    Except that Skype can be used for text chat like Allo. And Apple doesn't really treat Facetime as an app.
    • denzil_correa 10y ago
      > And Apple doesn't really treat Facetime as an app. It's a separate app on the iPhone, no?
• weisser 10y ago
  Voice is the most separate and distinct. I use my google voice number whenever I sell or buy anything on CL and I'm sure there are many other more creative uses.
  • memco 10y ago
    I was really hoping to see some love for Voice on iOS 10 after they added the new messaging and voip features, but I doubt there is much hope of that actually happening. They have yet to release a version suitable for iPad, let alone integrating with new features.
  • nol13 10y ago
    I just use it to manage my voicemail, are there any viable alternatives?
• Mizza 10y ago
  They still have their XMPP as well, but they never enabled SSL so it sends messages in plaintext and won't federate to modern XMPP servers/clients. What a clusterfuck of a company.
  • cantbecool 10y ago
    So let me get this straight, it works with older XMPP servers, but not modern, up to date versions of said servers?
    • e7c6ht6iad 10y ago
      Google Talk is deprecated, do you really expect them to enable new features?
    • Arnt 10y ago
      No, it doesn't. Google tore down the federation on purpose, with a configuration change. Rumour has it that it was a spam response. There's an interesting similar spam campaign going on right now in email, BTW. https://wordtothewise.com/2016/09/ongoing-subscription-form-abuse/ https://wordtothewise.com/2016/09/ongoing-subscription-form-...
  • dima55 10y ago
    The federation thing is something they explicitly broke. Google talk could talk to other XMPP servers just fine
  • sidcool 10y ago
    Calling Google a clusterfuck of a company is appalling. They would not do this without a strategic thought. Even Facebook has Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and FB itself. All doing pretty well.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • barkingdog 10y ago
• rajeshp1986 10y ago
  In the end, I see all these apps dying. Even hangouts is crappy. They don't have a native mac client. Hangouts was a decent chat app they had. I wish they promoted hangouts as cross platform and as a competitor to both whatsapp and skype.
  • e7c6ht6iad 10y ago
    The Mac client for Hangouts got a big upgrade. It's not really native, but more like Slack (Electron).
    • swiley 10y ago
      Electron "apps" really suck honestly. They're very slow and large and eat memory.
      • rayiner 10y ago
        And battery life.
  • sbarre 10y ago
    It's not a perfect solution but you can log into your Hangouts account on OS X's Messages app, so you can largely combine iMessage and Hangouts on your desktop in one app if you use both. I'm often surprised how many people don't know that Messages semi-supports Hangouts (not implying that you don't).. Obviously things like video chat don't work, so it's more like what Google Talk used to be, but it's better than keeping 2 apps open.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• harry8 10y ago
  and their jabber, which used to be useful for desktop IM got converted into an sms replacement forced on everyone against their will who uses android. Upshot now if you use xmpp like you always did it's received as sms which is probably not what you wanted. Thanks google. So get into bed with them by all means, but don't be suprised once you're tied up they flip you over.
  • harry8 10y ago
    Oh and encryption. That's not default like it should be, it's a "Mode within" that you have to select. Which people won't because of the hassle and mass surveillance continues. If they made the bloody thing properly encrypted end to end all the time I could forgive them for their blatant bait and switch, for keeping everyone's email searchable by the nsa in gmail (whether you use it or not, your mail is there) and all the rest. But no, surveillance is what google do and they're addicted to it. Do no evil, yeah they announced they dropped that, didn't they?
    • tdkl 10y ago
      > Which people won't because of the hassle and mass surveillance continues. That's why they added it. Now they can market it as "we have encryption too", but it's so out of the primary experience that not many will bother with it. E2E has become a checkmark to list, because most don't care about the most important part - how it works. It's similar with Facebooks secret messages, where the secret messages are apart from regular ones. Lets face it: the only thing this was built is Google collecting data to feed the "Google assistant".
• AstralStorm 10y ago
  Now you know how many teams Google has working on messengers.
• _pmf_ 10y ago
  Don't worry, they'll discontinue the most popular one on a whim once people love it.
• skyrw 10y ago
  The only killer feature that hangouts has is that it's the only reliable way to talk to any of your friends that work at google.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• krisgenre 10y ago
  They also have 'Spaces'.
• whack 10y ago
  There was a NYtimes article a few years ago, which I thought perfectly captured the fundamental difference between Apple and Google's product planning process. Apple runs on Intelligent Design. You have a room full of geniuses who decide what to build, make sure it fits perfectly into their overall product portfolio with minimal overlap or cannibalization, spend years in a dark secret room building it until it's perfectly polished, and then do a big-bang launch. Google on the other hand, runs on evolution. You've got tens of thousands of smart people all over the company, each with their own cool ideas and visions. Director #1 decides it would be cool to have a single unified messaging/video app that works across all platforms; Director #2 decides it would be cool to have a messaging app that's perfectly customized for mobile phones and Random-Guy #3 decides to do a 20℅ project on a messaging app that integrates AI functionality. Instead of trying to pick a winner, and telling everyone else to abandon their projects, Google allows all 3 visions to play themselves out on a small scale, and then doubles down on the winner. Rather than having a perfect product portfolio like Apple, Google is almost like an incubator, full of interesting ideas and projects, even if they lack the structure that comes with Central Planning. The downside of course, is brand confusion and dilution. People looking for a messaging app, and not having the time to explore all options thoroughly, will have a hard time figuring out which Google-messaging-app to go with. If they pick a non-optimal one, it's going to hurt the Google brand in their eyes. But the upside is innovation. Allowing multiple ideas to play themselves out at the same time, allows for so much more innovation, experimentation and iteration. And ultimately, I think those are the qualities that Google wants to prioritize.
  • danohu 10y ago
    The Google approach would be great, if they just separated it from the Google brand. Like, when Unilever launch a new detergent, they give it a totally separate brand. If it fails, they drop it quietly, and if it succeeds they can roll it out worldwide. I wish Google would do the same. Launch this as 'allo', with the fact that it's from alphabet buried in the small print. Once it's been doing well for a couple of years, they can think about pulling it into the Google brand and pushing it to every user in the world.
    • 10y ago
• ryandvm 10y ago
  Google really has nailed usability with Duo. It's clean and fast and easy to use. The potential is there. If I was optimistic, I'd say their strategy will be to force their way into the market by integrating it into the OS via Contacts or maybe even lower. Of course Hangouts had potential too. And then Slack came along and ate their lunch on the business side. It's really kind of ridiculous that every single organization that I know of that uses Google Apps has decided to ignore Hangouts and use Slack instead. How shitty must your free group chat client be that your customers are paying to replace it... I feel like Google is my corporate spirit animal because we operate the exact same why. We both like to start super cool side projects, get 70% of the way through it and then just completely lose interest.
  • sbarre 10y ago
    Huh.. I had never looked at Duo and I scrolled down the landing page and saw "Preview incoming video calls before accepting them" and now I want FaceTime and Skype to immediately integrate that.. That's a killer feature..
    • sorenjan 10y ago
      Why? Are you going to decline calls based on the preview? How do you explain that to the other person?
      • zeveb 10y ago
        > Are you going to decline calls based on the preview? How do you explain that to the other person? From the calling end, the person just sees that you didn't pick up, right? So he wouldn't know that you declined because of the preview.
    • CoryG89 10y ago
      Maybe it's just me, but I kind of find this a bit creepy. It seems to me that it would be similar if the phone companies allowed you to listen to someone calling you while it was still ringing for them. Maybe it's not quite what I am thinking though. I can't tell if the video preview is live or if it's something recorded before the call is made.
• akerro 10y ago
  W8, what's Voice, Messenger and Duo?
• jimkri 10y ago
  I just bought the Nexus 5x and it had both Hangouts and Messenger downloaded. I use messenger but google needs to just focus on one strong app. It is annoying to have one app that has great features, but not all. Messenger is great, but Duo looks interesting too.