4 ms·

It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop cl

It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS. With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison. When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these days. I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of incorporating these features into one of their existing applications. It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.

soylentcola 10y ago
For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising. And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.
- wldcordeiro 10y ago
  The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.

soylentcola 10y ago

For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising. And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.

wldcordeiro 10y ago
The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.