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This is exactly why so many of my friends and family use Hangouts née Gmail Chat. We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No

This is exactly why so many of my friends and family use Hangouts née Gmail Chat. We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever. Then the conversations follow when you log off whatever desktop or laptop you're on via the mobile app. About half of us use Android so it either comes standard or you can easily install. The other half uses iOS and unlike iMessage/iChat/Facetime, you can easily use it on iOS as well as Android. I installed Allo today but so far I haven't had a chance to try it out. Frankly it gives me the same mild annoyance I felt when Facebook broke messaging out into a separate app (and when I just said screw it and uninstalled both). As much as I use and generally like Google stuff, they drive me nuts with their approach a lot of the time. When GChat/Talk became Hangouts and started integrating Voice and SMS/MMS, it seemed like a move in the right direction, both for them as a company (wanting to be your one stop shop for messaging) and for me as a user (less apps, more seamless integration). Then SMS/MMS was split back off into Messaging, Voice...I haven't really heard much about Voice in a while which is weird because it was one of those things that seemed so promising at one point. And now Duo alongside the pretty great video chat already in Hangouts and Allo alongside Messaging alongside Hangouts. I get the idea of maybe starting a secondary platform/service/app to see what sticks and what doesn't. At worst they can integrate the good bits into their main product (see: Inbox). But their messaging strategy seems more like publishing Inbox with the intention of just ditching plain old Gmail.

bmaupin 10y ago
> We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. There's also https://hangouts.google.com/ https://hangouts.google.com/
- GFischer 10y ago
  Didn't know about that ! Interesting.
- TuringNYC 10y ago
  Yes, good point -- forgot to mention that. That is a 3rd widely-available option across all three silos (Android/iOS/Desktop).
  - kbenson 10y ago
    Yet apparently not business accounts. You can use the integrated hangouts in gmail, and the phone apps, but hangouts.google.com says it's not an enabled app for your account, and I can't seem to find where it's available to enable/add in the admin console (that is, I can find where to enable and add apps, but it isn't listed, and I'm a super admin). The Apps marketplace has third party apps, but that's not what I'm looking for.
    - lwf 10y ago
      I'm able to use hangouts.google.com in both my personal Google Apps domain and my work's Google Apps domain. Almost certainly a setting buried somewhere deep in the Admin Console. :(
      - kbenson 10y ago
        Thanks for the heads up. Not that I know it's at least possible, I'll spend some time and did a little deeper. I'm interested in seeing how it compares to Slack (basically, how well it uses the defined groups and membership in them that are already configured).
        SysArchitect 10y ago
        Non-existent... at least in my experience with my Google Apps account.
    - fharper1961 10y ago
      hangouts.google.com is enabled on my business account. I didn't enable it, so I can't tell you how it was done. Only that it's possible.
- TheBeardKing 10y ago
  The hangouts chrome extension is even handier while keeping your browser minimized.
calinet6 10y ago
My lord, why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3? They had an established userbase, a name, a brand, and useful cross-platform tools already. I get the desire to start fresh, but that's a lot of established traction in a very crowded market to just throw away.
- ickwabe 10y ago
  Apparently Google plans to focus Hangouts on enterprise/business customers. http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focus-hangouts-business-consumers-allo-duo-release/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focu...
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  That is what I think also. One possible explanation: internally Google eats their own dog food. When I was a contractor there, everything ran on gmail, gooogle docs, and hangouts. Perhaps they wanted something better for internal use, and now we get to use it also?
- random42 10y ago
  > why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3? I was wondering that too. I honestly suspect some executive in Google's team wanted to have more visibility, team and power.
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    Resume Driven Development
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    oh I thought this was some new Hangouts interface, but it's not is it? So...Google Buzz. If they want something really innovative, bring back open standards and a federated IM protocol. We went from AIM/Yahoo/MSN to XMPP .. and back to Google/FB. It feels like a regression.
    - tw04 10y ago
Tehnix 10y ago
Breaking facebook messenger out into its own app was the best decision facebook ever made! I chat via messenger a lot more than I check my newsfeed, and when I check my newsfeed I don't care about messages. Perfect split for me at least :)
- janvidar 10y ago
  I don't want Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook app cannot be uninstalled on my device since it came preinstalled with the Android OS on it (HTC One - it can however be disabled). Now, if someone uses Facebook Messenger to send me a message, my Facebook app will notify me about unread messages - I've disabled most notifications, but the icon still gets a number increase indicating messages that can be read. These messages cannot be read from within the app without installing Messenger. Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app. The only sad part here are the few "friends" that actually write their messages to /dev/null trying to reach me... I've been contemplating disabling my FB account altogether, but it turns out it is required sometimes for authentication. Spotify being an important one for me.
  - jeppebemad 10y ago
    For me at least, the messenger is still working on Facebook.com, also on messenger.com. I'm sure it does for you too?
    - personlurking 10y ago
      > Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app. Ditto. Works for me, too. I use FB.com to see messages on mobile Safari. The only reason I don't use FB.com for everything is cause FB app allows me to upload video (but since I can't seem to get video posted to FB, via my iPhone 5C, to come out nicely, I'm going to delete the app too).
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      On Chrome on Android, at least, if you don't use "Request desktop site", you can't get messages on messenger.com or facebook.com (the messages icon doesn't even show up on the latter, and the former just directs you to an app download.) You can use "request desktop site" on messenger.com (and probably also facebook.com), or use mbasic.facebook.com to get messages without the messenger app.
snowfield 10y ago
I dont see how breaking out the messaging part was bad, the messenger app is far superior to the normal one and the chatheads is great. has the same benefit as hangouts, (multiplatform)
- soylentcola 10y ago
  Just speaking for myself but I liked being able to just open Facebook when I want to look at Facebook. That goes for PMs people send me on Facebook. I didn't want a second app running at all times in the background when my goal was to minimize Facebook usage when possible. Now I have to jump through hoops to check messages every once in a while on my phone because they make it so they won't show up on mobile unless you install their secondary app or switch to a desktop user agent. So now I just check messages once or twice a week on desktop and use their service even less often.
snowwrestler 10y ago
I use Google Voice for a second phone number on my iPhone and yeah, it worries me how little attention it seems to get. It took Google forever to update it to match the iOS 7 "flat" look. And to this day it's missing a pretty obvious feature: search! Yes, there is no search functionality in the Google Voice app on iPhone. Apple's Messages and Facebook Messenger both have it.
- curt15 10y ago
  There is no search functionality in the hangouts app either. What other messaging apps lack the ability to search conversations? Google's own SMS messenger app implements search beautifully.
  - SubiculumCode 10y ago
    Well. Maybe it is not the same for you, but hangout messages get archived as emails in gmail. so search gmail maybe?
- wehadfun 10y ago
  Also no API. Google Voice has been ignored for so long. Probably because it is not easy to advertise on or get data from
  - aroch 10y ago
    They definitely use the voicemail transcription feature as training/test data for their NLP stuff
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Periodic 10y ago
Part of the problem is that they want to change the backends too. Hangouts had a lot of problems. Allo is their way of trying to create a clean slate and break away from the legacy of Hangouts. They can still keep Hangouts for some things, but they want to focus on a product that will get picked up by your average mobile user. People these days like using phone numbers for identification and a lot of users don't ever use a desktop. They're building for that user first. We'll see if it ever becomes a chat product the rest of us want to use. For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me. My wife also had three account entities for the same name in the Google system and sometimes her reply would get sent to a new chat. So about once a week my history with her would start fresh. However, I agree that hangouts has been my preferred chat application for a long time and I'm disappointed how hard it is to get into the siloed worlds that a lot of chat apps have these days.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me. I had something similar to this happen a year or two ago. Messaged not showing up, or silently showing up later, and generally from one or two people of those I used hangouts with. In my case it was either a separate app that still thought it was the default SMS application (so Messages was default for SMS, but Hangouts was still set up to be integrated with SMS, or possibly it went weird if Messages was running even if Hangouts was the default SMS app), and once I disabled the old app, I got much more consistent behavior.
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  >break away from the legacy of Hangouts Hangouts itself was supposed to be the "look at all the stuff we can do if we abandon XMPP" rewrite. And it's only three years old. How can they need to do it again?
kbenson 10y ago
Unfortunately it's a trend for Google to lose features in replacements and event new versions sometimes. I use Inbox for my personal gmail account, because I like how it lets me manage my personal mail. Unfortunately, there's still some integrations with calendars and stuff that doesn't work in Inbox but works in Gmail. And you can't search hangouts in Inbox (even though hangouts is integrated into it). Want to search hangouts message history? Open a tab and sign into gmail, and use that. Seriously, why do I have to lose so much of the functionality I grew accustomed to in the past when the app is from the same company? So frustrating.
restalis 10y ago
"This is exactly why so many of my friends and family use Hangouts née Gmail Chat. We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever." That's exactly why I don't use browser-only IM clients. I don't want to keep open a full-fledged browser only to stay online when something much less would be sufficient. Ideally, a IM should offer a broad list of solutions: web-based, desktop native clients, mobile apps, and whatever else one might think about. One size fits all is only a sure way to self limit the adoption of your IM solution.

bmaupin 10y ago

> We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. There's also https://hangouts.google.com/ https://hangouts.google.com/

GFischer 10y ago
Didn't know about that ! Interesting.
TuringNYC 10y ago
Yes, good point -- forgot to mention that. That is a 3rd widely-available option across all three silos (Android/iOS/Desktop).
- kbenson 10y ago
  Yet apparently not business accounts. You can use the integrated hangouts in gmail, and the phone apps, but hangouts.google.com says it's not an enabled app for your account, and I can't seem to find where it's available to enable/add in the admin console (that is, I can find where to enable and add apps, but it isn't listed, and I'm a super admin). The Apps marketplace has third party apps, but that's not what I'm looking for.
  - lwf 10y ago
    I'm able to use hangouts.google.com in both my personal Google Apps domain and my work's Google Apps domain. Almost certainly a setting buried somewhere deep in the Admin Console. :(
    - kbenson 10y ago
      Thanks for the heads up. Not that I know it's at least possible, I'll spend some time and did a little deeper. I'm interested in seeing how it compares to Slack (basically, how well it uses the defined groups and membership in them that are already configured).
      - SysArchitect 10y ago
        Non-existent... at least in my experience with my Google Apps account.
  - fharper1961 10y ago
    hangouts.google.com is enabled on my business account. I didn't enable it, so I can't tell you how it was done. Only that it's possible.
TheBeardKing 10y ago
The hangouts chrome extension is even handier while keeping your browser minimized.

calinet6 10y ago

My lord, why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3? They had an established userbase, a name, a brand, and useful cross-platform tools already. I get the desire to start fresh, but that's a lot of established traction in a very crowded market to just throw away.

ickwabe 10y ago
Apparently Google plans to focus Hangouts on enterprise/business customers. http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focus-hangouts-business-consumers-allo-duo-release/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focu...
mark_l_watson 10y ago
That is what I think also. One possible explanation: internally Google eats their own dog food. When I was a contractor there, everything ran on gmail, gooogle docs, and hangouts. Perhaps they wanted something better for internal use, and now we get to use it also?
random42 10y ago
> why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3? I was wondering that too. I honestly suspect some executive in Google's team wanted to have more visibility, team and power.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  Resume Driven Development
- djsumdog 10y ago
  oh I thought this was some new Hangouts interface, but it's not is it? So...Google Buzz. If they want something really innovative, bring back open standards and a federated IM protocol. We went from AIM/Yahoo/MSN to XMPP .. and back to Google/FB. It feels like a regression.
  - tw04 10y ago

Tehnix 10y ago

Breaking facebook messenger out into its own app was the best decision facebook ever made! I chat via messenger a lot more than I check my newsfeed, and when I check my newsfeed I don't care about messages. Perfect split for me at least :)

janvidar 10y ago
I don't want Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook app cannot be uninstalled on my device since it came preinstalled with the Android OS on it (HTC One - it can however be disabled). Now, if someone uses Facebook Messenger to send me a message, my Facebook app will notify me about unread messages - I've disabled most notifications, but the icon still gets a number increase indicating messages that can be read. These messages cannot be read from within the app without installing Messenger. Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app. The only sad part here are the few "friends" that actually write their messages to /dev/null trying to reach me... I've been contemplating disabling my FB account altogether, but it turns out it is required sometimes for authentication. Spotify being an important one for me.
- jeppebemad 10y ago
  For me at least, the messenger is still working on Facebook.com, also on messenger.com. I'm sure it does for you too?
  - personlurking 10y ago
    > Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app. Ditto. Works for me, too. I use FB.com to see messages on mobile Safari. The only reason I don't use FB.com for everything is cause FB app allows me to upload video (but since I can't seem to get video posted to FB, via my iPhone 5C, to come out nicely, I'm going to delete the app too).
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    On Chrome on Android, at least, if you don't use "Request desktop site", you can't get messages on messenger.com or facebook.com (the messages icon doesn't even show up on the latter, and the former just directs you to an app download.) You can use "request desktop site" on messenger.com (and probably also facebook.com), or use mbasic.facebook.com to get messages without the messenger app.

snowfield 10y ago

I dont see how breaking out the messaging part was bad, the messenger app is far superior to the normal one and the chatheads is great. has the same benefit as hangouts, (multiplatform)

soylentcola 10y ago
Just speaking for myself but I liked being able to just open Facebook when I want to look at Facebook. That goes for PMs people send me on Facebook. I didn't want a second app running at all times in the background when my goal was to minimize Facebook usage when possible. Now I have to jump through hoops to check messages every once in a while on my phone because they make it so they won't show up on mobile unless you install their secondary app or switch to a desktop user agent. So now I just check messages once or twice a week on desktop and use their service even less often.

snowwrestler 10y ago

I use Google Voice for a second phone number on my iPhone and yeah, it worries me how little attention it seems to get. It took Google forever to update it to match the iOS 7 "flat" look. And to this day it's missing a pretty obvious feature: search! Yes, there is no search functionality in the Google Voice app on iPhone. Apple's Messages and Facebook Messenger both have it.

curt15 10y ago
There is no search functionality in the hangouts app either. What other messaging apps lack the ability to search conversations? Google's own SMS messenger app implements search beautifully.
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  Well. Maybe it is not the same for you, but hangout messages get archived as emails in gmail. so search gmail maybe?
wehadfun 10y ago
Also no API. Google Voice has been ignored for so long. Probably because it is not easy to advertise on or get data from
- aroch 10y ago
  They definitely use the voicemail transcription feature as training/test data for their NLP stuff
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Periodic 10y ago

Part of the problem is that they want to change the backends too. Hangouts had a lot of problems. Allo is their way of trying to create a clean slate and break away from the legacy of Hangouts. They can still keep Hangouts for some things, but they want to focus on a product that will get picked up by your average mobile user. People these days like using phone numbers for identification and a lot of users don't ever use a desktop. They're building for that user first. We'll see if it ever becomes a chat product the rest of us want to use. For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me. My wife also had three account entities for the same name in the Google system and sometimes her reply would get sent to a new chat. So about once a week my history with her would start fresh. However, I agree that hangouts has been my preferred chat application for a long time and I'm disappointed how hard it is to get into the siloed worlds that a lot of chat apps have these days.

kbenson 10y ago
> For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me. I had something similar to this happen a year or two ago. Messaged not showing up, or silently showing up later, and generally from one or two people of those I used hangouts with. In my case it was either a separate app that still thought it was the default SMS application (so Messages was default for SMS, but Hangouts was still set up to be integrated with SMS, or possibly it went weird if Messages was running even if Hangouts was the default SMS app), and once I disabled the old app, I got much more consistent behavior.
prodigal_erik 10y ago
>break away from the legacy of Hangouts Hangouts itself was supposed to be the "look at all the stuff we can do if we abandon XMPP" rewrite. And it's only three years old. How can they need to do it again?

kbenson 10y ago

Unfortunately it's a trend for Google to lose features in replacements and event new versions sometimes. I use Inbox for my personal gmail account, because I like how it lets me manage my personal mail. Unfortunately, there's still some integrations with calendars and stuff that doesn't work in Inbox but works in Gmail. And you can't search hangouts in Inbox (even though hangouts is integrated into it). Want to search hangouts message history? Open a tab and sign into gmail, and use that. Seriously, why do I have to lose so much of the functionality I grew accustomed to in the past when the app is from the same company? So frustrating.

restalis 10y ago

"This is exactly why so many of my friends and family use Hangouts née Gmail Chat. We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever." That's exactly why I don't use browser-only IM clients. I don't want to keep open a full-fledged browser only to stay online when something much less would be sufficient. Ideally, a IM should offer a broad list of solutions: web-based, desktop native clients, mobile apps, and whatever else one might think about. One size fits all is only a sure way to self limit the adoption of your IM solution.