I haven't had much problems with Google Hangouts but on the other hand I'm a light user: I just wanted a real-time text chat and didn't suffer from most of the

I haven't had much problems with Google Hangouts but on the other hand I'm a light user: I just wanted a real-time text chat and didn't suffer from most of the problems decribed in the article. Yes, the video chat was choppy but so was any other video call at the time; I still managed to talk to my wife over video on business trips so it wasn't unusable. I still like the Gmail chat that you can pop up into a separate window. It's fast and reliable. However, the issue with Hangouts is that I don't have people there anymore. I talk to 1-2 friends on Hangouts who refuse to use Facebook or Whatsapp. That's all nice but ten years ago I had a significant portion of my friends in Google Talk. They still have Gmail accounts but they chat elsewhere.