23 ms·

Source: Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020

348 points by shaklee3 8y ago

crazygringo 8y ago
The only thing I still use Hangouts for is ongoing big group chats with old groups of friends (e.g. little convo every couple weeks), because: 1) Everyone's got a Gmail tab open during the day so they'll see it eventually but it doesn't bother them immediately like SMS and they don't need to install anything. (Literally no other service my friends have in common, e.g. some have Slack and some use Facebook but definitely not everyone.) 2) Group SMS is still a mess -- when you start one with a new group of friends (e.g. classmates) it just shows as random phone numbers for everyone, nobody has names until you create contacts for all of them, and there are still always mysterious problems like some messages only going between iPhones, messages being duplicated and triplicated, etc... So if this is true, I guess my old chat groups will just... die... oh well. Maybe we'll go back to e-mail, but it doesn't feel as fun.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  You could set up a Discord, maybe. It means another thing to keep an eye on, but the Discord client is pretty good and has deeply configurable push notifications.
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    2019: We are happy to announce our joining of forces with Discord! It's our hope that, together, we can create a more cohesive Google experience. 2022: All good things must come to an end! It was a wild ride, but sadly, we will be closing Discord to make way for a more cohesive Google experience.
- war1025 8y ago
  I use Facebook Messenger for group chats. I suppose that requires that the people you're trying to stay in touch with are also on Facebook though, which seems less common these days.
  - eigenvector 8y ago
    You can make a Messenger-only account with just a phone number, provided that phone number has never been linked to a 'real' Facebook account. Of course, Facebook is almost certainly creating a 'shadow profile' for all of those users in case they ever decide to join Facebook so it doesn't really solve the privacy issues that anyone who chooses not to use FB likely has.
    - Marsymars 8y ago
      > You can make a Messenger-only account with just a phone number, provided that phone number has never been linked to a 'real' Facebook account. Wait, how does that work? If my phone number previously belonged to someone who had it linked to a Facebook account, then I can never use it for a Messenger account?
      - eigenvector 8y ago
        The last time I tried it, it would only prompt me to sign in to the linked account. No option to make a new account or disassociate that number from the account.
- eigenvector 8y ago
  The killer feature of Hangouts and Talk before it was always that people didn't need to sign up for or install anything if they already had a Google account. That was lightyears ahead in 2006 when most people were using a desktop mail client and one or more desktop chat clients and SMS to talk on the go. Fast forward to 2018 and the probability of convincing any non-tech person to sign up for a new service just to talk to you is even lower than in 2006 when new services at least had novelty.
- shaklee3 8y ago
  That's not been my experience with group sms. It's worked perfectly, and all names show properly
mxuribe 8y ago
Google's behavior with its messaging platforms really boggles my mind. There's always more to a story sure, and certainly more to why google keeps jumping around - or perhaps flopping around is a better term here. But honestly, one would think whatever behind-the-scene reasons would have settled down by now, eh? I think google should simply take the plunge and adopt matrix as their messaging protocol. The protocol provides messaging and telephony. Since - much like email - matrix is federated, google could even pair matrix server hosting with their G Suite products. Basically google would be an organization's email, docs, and now matrix/messaging server provider (in addition to the other services included in g suite)...I'm not the biggest fan of google (nor g suite), but i do acknowledge that so many organizations depend on google for their g suite platform. Also, leveraging - and contributing to the greater matrix.org effort - the matrix platform would show the world that google is still happy to collaborate on open source efforts. ...Or, maybe i'm thinking too altruistically?
- zanny 8y ago
  You absolutely are. If Google cared a decade ago they could have strong arm overhauled XMPP into whatever they wanted. Even Facebook Messenger (which also used XMPP until I want to say 2016? which is coincidentally when I stopped ever using Facebook messenger) would have bent to their will. They simply chose not to, and instead make yet another proprietary non-federated protocol and practically single handledly fractured what was at the time turning into a reasonable communication ecosystem where MSM, Facebook Messenger, and GTalk were all the big games in town but were also all XMPP compatible.
  - mxuribe 8y ago
    Oh wow, i totally forgot about xmpp; you're right! I forgot how i enjoyed using pidgin client to interact with my gTalk friends.
butterandguns 8y ago
So what does this mean for Google Voice and Google Fi users? All my SMS runs through Hangouts.
- xtagon 8y ago
  With Google Voice + Hangouts you can also answer phone calls from a desktop computer/laptop very easily. I'll miss that.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    www.google.com/voice Should be able to make calls from there, right?
    - xtagon 8y ago
      I don't think that works for receiving incoming calls though.
      - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        There’s a slider in the iOS app that indicates it might be possible to enable. I’ll have to try that when I have a chance.
  - Marsymars 8y ago
    I recently looked into ways to do this outside of the US. Seems to be basically impossible other than using an iPhone/Mac with Continuity. :(
    - QuicksilverJohn 8y ago
      No, Hangouts works great for this outside of the US. I use it in New Zealand all the time.
      - 4ad 8y ago
bootlooped 8y ago
Messaging in the Google ecosystem is probably the biggest mess of any of their product lines. It should be a case study in business schools.
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  yes, I'll be damned if I ever use Allo, no matter how many ads I receive about it.
chris_wot 8y ago
What is it replaced with?
- jdoliner 8y ago
  Knowing Google it'll be 8 new, competing messaging products called: H, A, N, G, O, U, T and S. Each capturing one aspect of the essence of hangouts and building an entire chat experience around it that will be the future of chat.
- bdz 8y ago
  Duo most likely
  - lsofzz 8y ago
    Google Duo needs to bring long distance calling service if it is to replace Hangouts.
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  Allo, which is already being abandoned itself, never having gained the traction of Hangouts. Ultimately, it looks like Google is giving up in favor of RCS (the rich SMS protocol).
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    RCS will never see widespread use. It's too tied to phone numbers and mobile devices (have fun getting those RCS messages on your tablet or laptop or when you have no 4G). It's also too tied to carriers, who might introduce weird billing "RCS messages to abroad cost $$$$". Its also without any end to end encryption, and seems to have an odd 1 or 2 second delay delivering messages which means truly interactive conversations aren't really possible. Each of those things alone makes it less attractive to one usergroup. Together, I'd guess it'll never see widespread use.
    - smt88 8y ago
      I don't know anyone outside of tech who would care about RCS being tied to phone numbers, being offered through the carrier, or having a delay. Most people I know (US perspective of course) chat mostly on iMessage and SMS. They'd love RCS.
SwellJoe 8y ago
Google is terrible at this. They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they? I used and loved the old Google Talk. Then they shuttered it and pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same? Not better, not worse, just a very similar experience, with maybe better voice/video support. So, now they're killing this one, too? Is there a turf battle among teams over chat within Google? I can't think of any other reason for them to keep killing products that work and have millions of users with nearly identical products that have no users. So much wasted energy. How many times do they think people will switch platforms before switching to something else made by a company that won't kill the product every few years?
- bootlooped 8y ago
  My impression from reading stories about Google culture is that there is a very strong emphasis on launching products.
  - vikinghckr 8y ago
    That's not necessarily a bad thing for consumers if the replacement product is just as good or better than the previous one.
    - Mindless2112 8y ago
      Putting aside quality comparisons, consider that Skype is still "Skype". Even non-technical people know what Skype is, whereas no one knows for sure what Google's Skype competitor is going to be.
      - snaky 8y ago
        > Skype is still "Skype" In name only. Even non-technical people know what huge pile of crap "Skype" is nowadays.
        varjag 8y ago
        No, it's the same product with enormous care for user transition. Right now I sit in a Skype chatroom continuously running since 2007.
jdoliner 8y ago
If Google does this it may be the thing that finally convinces me to move my messaging and phone away from their ecosystem. Hangouts has kinda been the thing holding my experience together as I adopted Google voice early and a lot of people only have that number, biggest mistake of my life right there. We'll see though, talk is cheap and I'm lazy, so most likely I just tolerate the abuse.
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  If it helps, I moved away from Google Voice a while ago by porting my number. Went to Verizon, got a new number and got a iPhone running. Then called Verizon and ported my google voice number onto the new number. Google asked for $10 for porting out. I happily obliged. My phone number moved over without any pauses in service. I’ve been using iMessage/SMS ever since and it works wonders. Edit: spelling
  - jdeibele 8y ago
    I had ported my phone number to Google Voice back when I was using Android phones. My wife insists on Apple products and eventually I switched to an iPhone myself. I ported my number back out but set up another Google Voice number. Now, if I miss a call, it forwards to the GV number. So I get transcriptions (via email) which aren't perfect but better than anything else I've seen. 9 times out of 10, I don't need to call the person back. It's a reminder, it's somebody I'll see later that day, etc. I do wish that GV would not send me notices that I have voicemail when the person (or more likely a computer) hung up when they heard voicemail. The GV number is also useful for things that insist on SMS where I want a secure number. No way for a person to go into a store and insist on getting my number transferred to their phone.
    - blindseer 8y ago
      There have been no major updates to Voice in a while (thankfully), but lots of marketing and buzz around Project Fi. I can't help but think that Google will kill Google Voice in the future. Google Voice is integrated with Hangouts as well, which means one of those features will go away, assuming the OP is true. I love using Voice for the same reasons you listed out, but I dread when Google decide to make a change in this space, I'll be very disappointed.
chocolatebunny 8y ago
Anyone know of a good alternative for group chat that doesn't tie your account to your phone#? My friends and I were joking about going back to icq since web.icq.com still works.
- owaislone 8y ago
  https://wire.com/ https://wire.com/ should work if your friends are willing to move.
- mxuribe 8y ago
  See matrix.org. Matrix is the protocol, but there are numerous server and client implementations, with riot.im being the most popular client and matrix.org being the most popular server.
  - gomox 8y ago
    Riot.im makes vim's UX seem intuitive.
- darawk 8y ago
  I use discord, which works great.
- snaky 8y ago
  IRC
- walterbell 8y ago
  Wire needs neither phone number nor contacts. Open-source, E2E encryption and working on IETF federation protocol with other messengers.
- Ibethewalrus 8y ago
  Zoom.us Skype. Zoom’s video is great, doesn’t heat my Mac like Hangouts
- nichos 8y ago
  Signal. Open source and secure.
Upvoter33 8y ago
What's really funny about this is that video conferencing during meetings is really good inside of google. They have a winner product on their hands and don't know how to get it to businesses where they would make tons of money. So amazingly bad at turning innovation into product.
- praneshp 8y ago
  > What's really funny about this is that video conferencing during meetings is really good inside of google I've heard the opposite of this from some googler friends.
  - what_ever 8y ago
    Hah, I completely disagree with them. VC/Calendar/Mail integration is amazing here. Disc: Googler.
- codemac 8y ago
  They offer it on their website: https://gsuite.google.com/products/hangouts-meet-hardware/ https://gsuite.google.com/products/hangouts-meet-hardware/ But the prices are steep compared to what a lot of small to medium businesses are willing to pay for when they think they can just use their laptops.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    The link above is for the hardware version. If you just want the software, you can use Hangouts Meet, which is free to install and also included in G Suite. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Hangouts.
    - taytus 8y ago
      Hangouts meet is different than just hangouts? Sorry for the silly question but I honestly have no idea anymore.
      - 8y ago
sciurus 8y ago
Originally Hangouts looked Google's answer to Apple's iMessage. You could send and receive messages via Hangouts or SMS within the same Android app. You could use Hangouts on your computer via Gmail or a standalone app. Then a few years ago they started pushing you to use SMS from a separate app, and eventually removed SMS functionality from the Hangouts Android app altogether. Then they launched Allo and pushed it for consumers, but from all accounts it flopped miserably. Now they're apparently going to push an evolution of SMS (RCS) as their consumer chat product. I'm wonder how they plan to integrate that on desktop. Personal anecdote: My wife and I have kept using Hangouts to communicate with each other out of inertia. On Android it's seemed stagnant for ages, but it's simple and works reliably. For family and friends we're using a mix of SMS and Facebook Messenger due to their preferences. Both of those are annoying, although in different ways. I suppose if consumer Hangouts dies we'll have to look at Whatsapp, Signal, etc. and see what's best.
- lowercased 8y ago
  > On Android it's seemed stagnant for ages, but it's simple and works reliably. "stagnant" implies it should be changing, but then you say "it works reliably". No changes for a year is 'rock solid' and 'stable', not 'needs an iteration push next month!'.
  - sciurus 8y ago
    It works reliably, but there's room for improvement. Two examples: Video call quality is noticably worse than Google Duo. Unlike SMS, Google Assistant can't read my Hangouts messages to me.
    - jdofaz 8y ago
      Hangouts worked in Android Auto voice assistant until recently. I don’t know if that was the same as the regular assistant
    - lowercased 8y ago
      I realized there's a middle ground, of course, after posting. I'm not a regular android user, but understand the 'room for improvement' line of thought for software in general. However, given how much things generally go downhill when new versions are released, 'improvements' in a real sense are often hard to come by. Often, I much prefer my stagnant releases vs watching features I use go away, or UI changes hide my normal workflows in 'upgrades'.
mjevans 8y ago
As long as whatever still works and lets me keep those numbers I paid to port in to Google Voice years ago and park so friends and family could forever reach me at the same bloody phone number irrespective of any other BS...
MrStonedOne 8y ago
I doubt this, as hangouts is integrated deeply into google fi, such that all sms messages between google fi users just go thru hangouts and hangouts is also used to send out going texts. Hangouts also powers google fi's wifi calling.
codyogden 8y ago
Add it to the list. killedbygoogle.com
cwyers 8y ago
There was a point a few years ago when most of my IMing was on Google. Now it's largely moved to Facebook and WhatsApp. So, maybe this is the right decision, but Google had what feels to me like a decisive market lead at one point that they frittered away because they couldn't manage a consistent strategy on messaging. And I guess I need to start trying to find the few stragglers I talk to through Hangouts on other messenger services.
- basch 8y ago
  aol - aim yahoo - yahoo messenger microsoft - msn, skype google - talk, voice, hangouts basically every one took too long to adapt to either web or mobile.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    Yes, well, I can understand why mobile was hard on AOL. I have a harder time understanding why the maker of the most popular mobile platform couldn't get their messaging story straight.
irrational 8y ago
Google is shutting down a product? That is so shocking. To be honest, this is the exact reason we didn't go with Google Cloud. We have zero trust that they won't just shut it off one day, no matter what they might claim. I do use google mail and google docs, but I always make sure I have anything important saved in a separate location so I'm prepared when these products are inevitably shut off.
com2kid 8y ago
At one point Hangouts was super easy to use. Send someone a link and they could join. The interface was iterated on repeatedly until it got to the point that I could barely figure out how in the world to invite people to join a Hangout without having at least a few people run into problems. It is my belief that Uberconference exists because Google dropped the ball so badly with Hangouts. For a brief moment, Hangouts let us live in an amazing future where group video chats happened spontaneously, and then someone had to iterate.
- nouseforaname 8y ago
  My take: we need to stop incentivizing "innovation" where everything needs to be rewritten every couple months just so someone can "disrupt" something. You know what it really is? It's a bunch of product people, all of who want to be Steve Jobs II, looking at the handful of innovative products Apple made over the last couple of decades and trying to achieve something similar results every single quarter. The problem? We've raised a whole generation of people who think that's not how you make products people love. We've have a whole generation of people who focus 100% on the ideation phase and 0% on the nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback. This fits into a larger theory I have that basically disruptive startups are the weeds of the ecosystem, but they aren't old growth trees. Call me old fashioned but I'm looking forward to the day "disruptive" companies based on "growth hacking" are replaced by some giant redwood trees that will stand the test of time as they (slowly) soar into the sky.
  - mciak 8y ago
    This doesn’t really hold true in China —- Steve Jobs is revered there but their startup scene is heavily oriented towards iterating and pivoting
  - derefr 8y ago
    You're talking like these are the same people ideating and then dropping products over and over. No: the people who build each product, even at Google, certainly enter a "nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback" phase with that product. The "problem", if you want to call it that, is that there are always new product people joining the company. And what the heck are they going to do to get recognized and promoted, if they don't build a new fiefdom to call their own? The actual question I have about Google and its business strategy, is why these new products always seem to displace old products (and their teams), rather than resulting in the internal equivalent of a merger. I can see good reason to have four teams building four distinct web VoIP clients, if one of them is the "flagship" one and three of them are experiments. I can also imagine one of those "experiments" getting really popular. But why should that result in the "flagship" dying? Why not just merge the teams together, and put the team from the "experiment" in charge of the pooled UX design talent for a new release of the "flagship" client?
JorgeGT 8y ago
Ask HN: any other IM client that has Hangout's transparent UI for desktops? I really like how unobtrusive it is.
lldata 8y ago
I will never adopt a google product again. g+ may be a total failure hangouts may be the less popular chat product But for me and my kids this was the channels we used when they grew up. We have so much history in our family chat and so many photos shared on google+. So now they just shut it down and don't even bother to migrate 10 years of my life to whatever is meant to replace those products. We are a generation who will leave nothing behind.
- acqq 8y ago
  Some time ago there was that comics about the "Chad's garage": https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/ The most interesting point is, "Chad" is really actively promoting his garages as something the people should definitely use... until he changes his opinion from time to time which garage and if at all the people should use this or that, and then lets people figure out what should they do next. And "Chad" is very rich and powerful, so people are attracted. Nice shelves every time.
- Iwan-Zotow 8y ago
  > We are a generation who will leave nothing behind. Lucky you I have 12Tb of backups - I don't know what to do with it
- derefr 8y ago
  > We have so much history in our family chat I don't think any IM chat product has ever promised to keep your history. They all let you "scroll back" on a best-effort basis, but I don't know of any IM chat service where the availability of historical messages is part of the semantics of the service. It's just... not what they're for. If you want the semantics of "real-time chat with history", what you actually want is a business collaboration tool, like Slack or its competitors. Businesses want records of meetings and the ability to dredge up stuff somebody said once, and are willing to pay for it, so services designed with business productivity in mind tend to have these semantics. (And even then, I don't think Slack makes any guarantees that it'll retain the history of your private DMs, only the history of your public channels. Exporting an archive of a Slack workspace doesn't get you archives of the DMs. So it would seem that, even for a business, the semantics of one-to-one conversations are more ephemeral than not.)
gigatexal 8y ago
Why do they insist on putting out useful products only to cancel them? Wtf is wrong with them?
- cronix 8y ago
  I'm not sure, but I've noticed the result is that I'm consciously using fewer and fewer google services. The more they keep doing this (just abandoning products, or charging astronomically more for them), the less likely I am to use their other services - or new ones, because I don't trust that they'll be around tomorrow. If you continuously show someone you're not stable or reliable, eventually they'll take the hint and believe you. I hope that's what they're going for because it's working. This year there's just been a lot of this with Inbox, G+, Maps increases, and now Hangouts.
ce4 8y ago
Android Police' headline is spot on: "Report: Google killing Hangouts in 2020, probably launching 8 new messaging services in its place" [0]. Mayur Kamat was HO's product manager until 2015 and has posted a few updates on G+ until he left Google, probably because Hangouts was internally about to be abandoned. Thats when I realized Hangouts fate and started looking elsewhere. I vividly remember his remark around the time of the Hangouts 4.0 release [1]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :). Good stuff is coming.": Alas, it wasn't. Edit: Maybe adding that name was wrong, my intention was not to blame any single person. Fact is: I liked Google Talk (and Hangouts) a lot for its superior abilities back then: Federation with XMPP, cross device compatibility, superior synch, possibly reach anyone with a G account, simultaneous login from different devices, permanent cloud based history, working search. It seemed so easy to win at that time. [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/30/report-google-killing-hangouts-in-2020-probably-will-launch-8-new-messaging-services-in-its-place/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/30/report-google-killi... [1] https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE
- bpye 8y ago
  I can believe he and his team wanted to make Hangouts better. Seems nobody else was on their side though.
  - ce4 8y ago
    Absolutely no blaming on him. He was responsible for Microsoft Messenger (if i'm not mistaken) before and the uncertainty with Google chat products (Allo, Duo, Hangouts Meet and who knows what else) is continuing without him.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  What have we come to when a tired silly meme is called "spot on" in the top comment on HackerNews.
elvirs 8y ago
Google needs to hire Satya Nadella as the CEO.
lwansbrough 8y ago
Big surprise! Another useful Google service gets put down. Why even bother launching products if you’re just gonna kill them after 2 years?
monksy 8y ago
Maybe someone serious can improve XMPP and deploy that.
garysahota93 8y ago
Suggestion of the day: They should integrate Google Voice + Android Messages / RCS to make a true iMessage competitor (with encryption / web sync / etc) AND THEN replace all references of _consumer_ Hangouts/Messaging with this new service. Here's where they could integrate it: -Gmail (as either the hangouts widget replacement or a new Gmail Addon) -Google Maps (so that any conversations you have show up in your main messages app too) -YouTube (why did they even make YouTube Messages? Put this in there so those messages show up in this unified app) -Google Sheets/Docs/Slides (so all comments / conversations can then be seen & referenced in this unified app) -Google Assistant Conversations (so you can see what you've written, but also have the conversation handy - similar, but more streamlined, to how it was/is in Allo) -Duo (so it's tightly integrated & conversations just magically work - similar to FaceTime/iMessage) -Google One (so all customer support conversations can also be bundled & seen in one unified view) -Hangouts Chat / Hangouts Meet (so if you use those services, they have a channel in this app too) -Anywhere else you use a Google service to type things! This would be the ULTIMATE messaging app. Here, I'll even throw in ways to monetize (so that it can live on forever): -You have your main chats, but also all these premium "channels"/"add-ons" (like the ones above) that outside business could integrate into within this app. Charge them similar to how WhatsApp is doing it -Create an add-on store for stickers/fonts/themes (similar to FB Messenger) but integrate into Play store for more revenue) -Sell this service to GSuite customers as a call center / messaging-based customer support service -Create an SMS api for developers and charge for its use (like Twilio and company) No ads. No subscription service (though I'd happily pay $1 per year - which at their scale could be billions). No hassle. No fragmentation. No problems. World hunger solved /end rant P.S. - If anyone wants to make this service, I'd happily co-found a company to do exactly this.
- dashmatte 8y ago
  ill give u some m,oney
jpeeler 8y ago
I've often gone out of my way to encourage people who want to message me to use hangouts in order to have a better chatting experience (versus SMS). And since I have Google Fi, the hangouts integration was perfect such that people who I couldn't convince to use hangouts would text me and I'd still have all the nice message synchronization features in the same app (which as far as I know nothing else offers - a web based client that's not dependent on the phone being available for receiving SMS). All that to say, I'll be sad to lose such nice integration with SMS. Although I can see Google still providing hangouts to Google Fi customers, I think it's probably time to jump ship at this point. Does anybody know if Matrix supports e2e encrypted chat yet? I don't really follow the project closely, but if this issue is up to date then it's not quite there yet: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779. I realize that bug is for the web client, but I'd feel better anyway knowing one of the biggest clients is using the feature.
timwis 8y ago
What about Hangouts calling (inbound/outbound) with your Google voice number? I'm moving from the US to the UK next month and was hoping to maintain my US number by porting it to Google Voice and using Hangouts calls. Anyone know an alternative?
cordite 8y ago
What will happen to Google voice texting through hangouts?
belltaco 8y ago
So they're willing to keep Gmail which isn't cheap to host and develop free but want to shutdown Google Chat? It feels like this is because Gmail brings in the moolah by making the user to sign in to Google.com, which means all their searches in other browser windows and tabs are tracked to that account leading to user data being collected to be targeted by advertisers. But they don't want to monetize chat data, either because it's not very useful or because of potential backlash, thus they can shut it down to save costs.
brody182 8y ago
what about google voice? will it shut down also?
jakelarkin 8y ago
this is basically what happens when BigTechCorp leaves its product decisions to the competitive empire building machinations of middle managers with 4 year vesting
angel_j 8y ago
LOL, most of the replies here are about how google fucked up, and sucks at stuff, yet this here HN Frontihspost is a dead-ass PR campaign for their paid work/collaboration tools; hangouts has probably been a technical success, so it's going business class only. we use https://talky.io/ https://talky.io/
anoncoward111 8y ago
Why? It's one of the best messaging platforms out there. Everyone I know has an email account. It is easier to reach me by gmail (and thus hangouts) than it is to reach me by phone, because my phone has bad service. Why on earth would they kill one of their best and most popular services? I don't use FB messenger at all, whatsapp reveals my phone number, Skype is an ABSOLUTE joke, and not everyone has Line, Viber, Telegram and so on.
int_19h 8y ago
IM in general is such a mess. All I really want is to have a single ID that people can use to text me from any device they might have (without having to install a special app, because they won't do it just for me), and that I can receive on any device that I have. We did this for email decades ago; why is IM not there yet?
- dasil003 8y ago
  Because email was not designed by capitalists.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Soviets or Chinese? I keep forgetting which non-capitalists designed email.
    - pers0n 8y ago
      He just means it wasn’t designed for the purpose or future hope of profits
rhizome 8y ago
Google should claw back bonuses and promotions involved in creating these services that get assassinated, to get people thinking more long-term. While I intensely dislike Google's product management, I feel like there might be a point in their favor that these developers or teams who are driven to only launch new stuff instead of maintaining and enhancing the old stuff are creating CS nightmares that can't be refactored, can't be extended, and the original developers may not even be found there anymore. In other words, to be fair to Google, this may be a problem of their own incentives.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  Do you really think the team that made, say, Google Talk, were the ones who wanted to kill it and push everyone to a different product? I don't know who made either one, but I would be shocked if the decision maker that pulled the plug had anything to do with the creation of the product. I, personally, don't like to kill my babies. Clawing back bonuses for something out of the control of the engineers seems like a dystopian nightmare, and any company that tried it would, hopefully, die a fiery death after an exodus of talent to more reasonable employers.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    > I, personally, don't like to kill my babies. I do. Software isn't my progeny or legacy. It is the tools in my workshop. If I can use one tool to do the work of five, I'll gladly downsize to declutter and simply my life. Finding self-worth in the longevity of tools is an emotional anti-pattern.
    - deong 8y ago
      I think you're taking him a bit too literally. In these examples, you're not looking at simplifying anything. You're not getting rid of unneeded code. You're getting rid of debugged and stable code in favor of writing something new from scratch because fuck all knows why.
      - 8y ago
zanny 8y ago
I'll get to my real pain point - anyone know of a replacement VOIP solution like Hangouts dialer that isn't subscription based? I've been giving my Hangouts number to people forever because its more convenient to have every device I have ring when someone uses the old PSTN but its not worth a recurring bill to me.
f055 8y ago
GOGON: Get off Google, now. :P Weird things are going to happen if Google were to shrink: paid gmail, premium search, subscription navigation in maps, lock screen ads in android, and hard monetisation of user data. A giant doesn’t go away without a fight, but Google users are not its customers, just data in its products, so...
kenhwang 8y ago
Good thing they're giving a year's notice similar to their enterprise SLAs, right?
sandyhatches 8y ago
I use Hangouts every single day, all day. It's the only app that let's me both chat and SMS from any device I have. I'll miss it very much when it's gone, as there is simply no replacement :/
wtmt 8y ago
Looks like Google is shutting down most of the consumer focused platforms where someone in the organization believes it’s expensive and not making money like selling ads does. I’m confident on Gmail and Maps staying around for the long term. The rest of the consumer side platforms could be removed or replaced (yet again).
clickme_zsh 8y ago
Google needs to focus on their current trend of killing their apps/services. It is surely affecting brand image and value.
phreack 8y ago
At this point, what do Googlers even use to chat internally? Slack? Skype?
- amerine 8y ago
  My experience so far in 2018 is they communicate via gmail messages and gdoc comments
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    "Man, if only we worked for a large software conglomerate... then we wouldn't have to use Cisco phones or communicate through Excel documents!"
chappi42 8y ago
You don't pay - what do you expect? Use Threema, Signal or Telegram; likely a more sustainable experience.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  You don't pay for those either, what makes you think it will be around in a few years? Go XMPP, Matrix, SIP - you can self-host these under your own domain, or actually pay for service, or with plain old SMS.
  - chappi42 8y ago
    Threema is a paid app. Signal (Telegram) is open source and the chat is a core service for their providers. I.e. more important than Hangout for Google.
ttty 8y ago
I don't know about you but I hated it. Takes ages to open up and is buggy. I have a S8 so you can't say that hardware is a problem. Just low quality Android app. I still use it because has good prices when calling abroad.
nwellinghoff 8y ago
Can we just all go back to irc already...jezzzz
xte 8y ago
Tying to leave Google as much as I can (hoping for Purism phone or something else to ditch Android, web part already done) I do not feel the loss... The real problem is that SFLPhone (now Ring) lost somewhat its way and Jitsi substantially do the same...

348 points by shaklee3 8y ago

The only thing I still use Hangouts for is ongoing big group chats with old groups of friends (e.g. little convo every couple weeks), because: 1) Everyone's got a Gmail tab open during the day so they'll see it eventually but it doesn't bother them immediately like SMS and they don't need to install anything. (Literally no other service my friends have in common, e.g. some have Slack and some use Facebook but definitely not everyone.) 2) Group SMS is still a mess -- when you start one with a new group of friends (e.g. classmates) it just shows as random phone numbers for everyone, nobody has names until you create contacts for all of them, and there are still always mysterious problems like some messages only going between iPhones, messages being duplicated and triplicated, etc... So if this is true, I guess my old chat groups will just... die... oh well. Maybe we'll go back to e-mail, but it doesn't feel as fun.

crooked-v 8y ago
You could set up a Discord, maybe. It means another thing to keep an eye on, but the Discord client is pretty good and has deeply configurable push notifications.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  2019: We are happy to announce our joining of forces with Discord! It's our hope that, together, we can create a more cohesive Google experience. 2022: All good things must come to an end! It was a wild ride, but sadly, we will be closing Discord to make way for a more cohesive Google experience.
war1025 8y ago
I use Facebook Messenger for group chats. I suppose that requires that the people you're trying to stay in touch with are also on Facebook though, which seems less common these days.
- eigenvector 8y ago
  You can make a Messenger-only account with just a phone number, provided that phone number has never been linked to a 'real' Facebook account. Of course, Facebook is almost certainly creating a 'shadow profile' for all of those users in case they ever decide to join Facebook so it doesn't really solve the privacy issues that anyone who chooses not to use FB likely has.
  - Marsymars 8y ago
    > You can make a Messenger-only account with just a phone number, provided that phone number has never been linked to a 'real' Facebook account. Wait, how does that work? If my phone number previously belonged to someone who had it linked to a Facebook account, then I can never use it for a Messenger account?
    - eigenvector 8y ago
      The last time I tried it, it would only prompt me to sign in to the linked account. No option to make a new account or disassociate that number from the account.
eigenvector 8y ago
The killer feature of Hangouts and Talk before it was always that people didn't need to sign up for or install anything if they already had a Google account. That was lightyears ahead in 2006 when most people were using a desktop mail client and one or more desktop chat clients and SMS to talk on the go. Fast forward to 2018 and the probability of convincing any non-tech person to sign up for a new service just to talk to you is even lower than in 2006 when new services at least had novelty.
shaklee3 8y ago
That's not been my experience with group sms. It's worked perfectly, and all names show properly

mxuribe 8y ago

Google's behavior with its messaging platforms really boggles my mind. There's always more to a story sure, and certainly more to why google keeps jumping around - or perhaps flopping around is a better term here. But honestly, one would think whatever behind-the-scene reasons would have settled down by now, eh? I think google should simply take the plunge and adopt matrix as their messaging protocol. The protocol provides messaging and telephony. Since - much like email - matrix is federated, google could even pair matrix server hosting with their G Suite products. Basically google would be an organization's email, docs, and now matrix/messaging server provider (in addition to the other services included in g suite)...I'm not the biggest fan of google (nor g suite), but i do acknowledge that so many organizations depend on google for their g suite platform. Also, leveraging - and contributing to the greater matrix.org effort - the matrix platform would show the world that google is still happy to collaborate on open source efforts. ...Or, maybe i'm thinking too altruistically?

zanny 8y ago
You absolutely are. If Google cared a decade ago they could have strong arm overhauled XMPP into whatever they wanted. Even Facebook Messenger (which also used XMPP until I want to say 2016? which is coincidentally when I stopped ever using Facebook messenger) would have bent to their will. They simply chose not to, and instead make yet another proprietary non-federated protocol and practically single handledly fractured what was at the time turning into a reasonable communication ecosystem where MSM, Facebook Messenger, and GTalk were all the big games in town but were also all XMPP compatible.
- mxuribe 8y ago
  Oh wow, i totally forgot about xmpp; you're right! I forgot how i enjoyed using pidgin client to interact with my gTalk friends.

butterandguns 8y ago

So what does this mean for Google Voice and Google Fi users? All my SMS runs through Hangouts.

xtagon 8y ago
With Google Voice + Hangouts you can also answer phone calls from a desktop computer/laptop very easily. I'll miss that.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  www.google.com/voice Should be able to make calls from there, right?
  - xtagon 8y ago
    I don't think that works for receiving incoming calls though.
    - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      There’s a slider in the iOS app that indicates it might be possible to enable. I’ll have to try that when I have a chance.
- Marsymars 8y ago
  I recently looked into ways to do this outside of the US. Seems to be basically impossible other than using an iPhone/Mac with Continuity. :(
  - QuicksilverJohn 8y ago
    No, Hangouts works great for this outside of the US. I use it in New Zealand all the time.
    - 4ad 8y ago

bootlooped 8y ago

Messaging in the Google ecosystem is probably the biggest mess of any of their product lines. It should be a case study in business schools.

PunchTornado 8y ago
yes, I'll be damned if I ever use Allo, no matter how many ads I receive about it.

chris_wot 8y ago

What is it replaced with?

jdoliner 8y ago
Knowing Google it'll be 8 new, competing messaging products called: H, A, N, G, O, U, T and S. Each capturing one aspect of the essence of hangouts and building an entire chat experience around it that will be the future of chat.
bdz 8y ago
Duo most likely
- lsofzz 8y ago
  Google Duo needs to bring long distance calling service if it is to replace Hangouts.
FactolSarin 8y ago
Allo, which is already being abandoned itself, never having gained the traction of Hangouts. Ultimately, it looks like Google is giving up in favor of RCS (the rich SMS protocol).
- londons_explore 8y ago
  RCS will never see widespread use. It's too tied to phone numbers and mobile devices (have fun getting those RCS messages on your tablet or laptop or when you have no 4G). It's also too tied to carriers, who might introduce weird billing "RCS messages to abroad cost $$$$". Its also without any end to end encryption, and seems to have an odd 1 or 2 second delay delivering messages which means truly interactive conversations aren't really possible. Each of those things alone makes it less attractive to one usergroup. Together, I'd guess it'll never see widespread use.
  - smt88 8y ago
    I don't know anyone outside of tech who would care about RCS being tied to phone numbers, being offered through the carrier, or having a delay. Most people I know (US perspective of course) chat mostly on iMessage and SMS. They'd love RCS.

SwellJoe 8y ago

Google is terrible at this. They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they? I used and loved the old Google Talk. Then they shuttered it and pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same? Not better, not worse, just a very similar experience, with maybe better voice/video support. So, now they're killing this one, too? Is there a turf battle among teams over chat within Google? I can't think of any other reason for them to keep killing products that work and have millions of users with nearly identical products that have no users. So much wasted energy. How many times do they think people will switch platforms before switching to something else made by a company that won't kill the product every few years?

bootlooped 8y ago
My impression from reading stories about Google culture is that there is a very strong emphasis on launching products.
- vikinghckr 8y ago
  That's not necessarily a bad thing for consumers if the replacement product is just as good or better than the previous one.
  - Mindless2112 8y ago
    Putting aside quality comparisons, consider that Skype is still "Skype". Even non-technical people know what Skype is, whereas no one knows for sure what Google's Skype competitor is going to be.
    - snaky 8y ago
      > Skype is still "Skype" In name only. Even non-technical people know what huge pile of crap "Skype" is nowadays.
      - varjag 8y ago
        No, it's the same product with enormous care for user transition. Right now I sit in a Skype chatroom continuously running since 2007.

jdoliner 8y ago

If Google does this it may be the thing that finally convinces me to move my messaging and phone away from their ecosystem. Hangouts has kinda been the thing holding my experience together as I adopted Google voice early and a lot of people only have that number, biggest mistake of my life right there. We'll see though, talk is cheap and I'm lazy, so most likely I just tolerate the abuse.

iscrewyou 8y ago
If it helps, I moved away from Google Voice a while ago by porting my number. Went to Verizon, got a new number and got a iPhone running. Then called Verizon and ported my google voice number onto the new number. Google asked for $10 for porting out. I happily obliged. My phone number moved over without any pauses in service. I’ve been using iMessage/SMS ever since and it works wonders. Edit: spelling
- jdeibele 8y ago
  I had ported my phone number to Google Voice back when I was using Android phones. My wife insists on Apple products and eventually I switched to an iPhone myself. I ported my number back out but set up another Google Voice number. Now, if I miss a call, it forwards to the GV number. So I get transcriptions (via email) which aren't perfect but better than anything else I've seen. 9 times out of 10, I don't need to call the person back. It's a reminder, it's somebody I'll see later that day, etc. I do wish that GV would not send me notices that I have voicemail when the person (or more likely a computer) hung up when they heard voicemail. The GV number is also useful for things that insist on SMS where I want a secure number. No way for a person to go into a store and insist on getting my number transferred to their phone.
  - blindseer 8y ago
    There have been no major updates to Voice in a while (thankfully), but lots of marketing and buzz around Project Fi. I can't help but think that Google will kill Google Voice in the future. Google Voice is integrated with Hangouts as well, which means one of those features will go away, assuming the OP is true. I love using Voice for the same reasons you listed out, but I dread when Google decide to make a change in this space, I'll be very disappointed.

chocolatebunny 8y ago

Anyone know of a good alternative for group chat that doesn't tie your account to your phone#? My friends and I were joking about going back to icq since web.icq.com still works.

owaislone 8y ago
https://wire.com/ https://wire.com/ should work if your friends are willing to move.
mxuribe 8y ago
See matrix.org. Matrix is the protocol, but there are numerous server and client implementations, with riot.im being the most popular client and matrix.org being the most popular server.
- gomox 8y ago
  Riot.im makes vim's UX seem intuitive.
darawk 8y ago
I use discord, which works great.
snaky 8y ago
IRC
walterbell 8y ago
Wire needs neither phone number nor contacts. Open-source, E2E encryption and working on IETF federation protocol with other messengers.
Ibethewalrus 8y ago
Zoom.us Skype. Zoom’s video is great, doesn’t heat my Mac like Hangouts
nichos 8y ago
Signal. Open source and secure.

Upvoter33 8y ago

What's really funny about this is that video conferencing during meetings is really good inside of google. They have a winner product on their hands and don't know how to get it to businesses where they would make tons of money. So amazingly bad at turning innovation into product.

praneshp 8y ago
> What's really funny about this is that video conferencing during meetings is really good inside of google I've heard the opposite of this from some googler friends.
- what_ever 8y ago
  Hah, I completely disagree with them. VC/Calendar/Mail integration is amazing here. Disc: Googler.
codemac 8y ago
They offer it on their website: https://gsuite.google.com/products/hangouts-meet-hardware/ https://gsuite.google.com/products/hangouts-meet-hardware/ But the prices are steep compared to what a lot of small to medium businesses are willing to pay for when they think they can just use their laptops.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  The link above is for the hardware version. If you just want the software, you can use Hangouts Meet, which is free to install and also included in G Suite. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Hangouts.
  - taytus 8y ago
    Hangouts meet is different than just hangouts? Sorry for the silly question but I honestly have no idea anymore.
    - 8y ago

sciurus 8y ago

Originally Hangouts looked Google's answer to Apple's iMessage. You could send and receive messages via Hangouts or SMS within the same Android app. You could use Hangouts on your computer via Gmail or a standalone app. Then a few years ago they started pushing you to use SMS from a separate app, and eventually removed SMS functionality from the Hangouts Android app altogether. Then they launched Allo and pushed it for consumers, but from all accounts it flopped miserably. Now they're apparently going to push an evolution of SMS (RCS) as their consumer chat product. I'm wonder how they plan to integrate that on desktop. Personal anecdote: My wife and I have kept using Hangouts to communicate with each other out of inertia. On Android it's seemed stagnant for ages, but it's simple and works reliably. For family and friends we're using a mix of SMS and Facebook Messenger due to their preferences. Both of those are annoying, although in different ways. I suppose if consumer Hangouts dies we'll have to look at Whatsapp, Signal, etc. and see what's best.

lowercased 8y ago
> On Android it's seemed stagnant for ages, but it's simple and works reliably. "stagnant" implies it should be changing, but then you say "it works reliably". No changes for a year is 'rock solid' and 'stable', not 'needs an iteration push next month!'.
- sciurus 8y ago
  It works reliably, but there's room for improvement. Two examples: Video call quality is noticably worse than Google Duo. Unlike SMS, Google Assistant can't read my Hangouts messages to me.
  - jdofaz 8y ago
    Hangouts worked in Android Auto voice assistant until recently. I don’t know if that was the same as the regular assistant
  - lowercased 8y ago
    I realized there's a middle ground, of course, after posting. I'm not a regular android user, but understand the 'room for improvement' line of thought for software in general. However, given how much things generally go downhill when new versions are released, 'improvements' in a real sense are often hard to come by. Often, I much prefer my stagnant releases vs watching features I use go away, or UI changes hide my normal workflows in 'upgrades'.

mjevans 8y ago

As long as whatever still works and lets me keep those numbers I paid to port in to Google Voice years ago and park so friends and family could forever reach me at the same bloody phone number irrespective of any other BS...

MrStonedOne 8y ago

I doubt this, as hangouts is integrated deeply into google fi, such that all sms messages between google fi users just go thru hangouts and hangouts is also used to send out going texts. Hangouts also powers google fi's wifi calling.

codyogden 8y ago

Add it to the list. killedbygoogle.com

cwyers 8y ago

There was a point a few years ago when most of my IMing was on Google. Now it's largely moved to Facebook and WhatsApp. So, maybe this is the right decision, but Google had what feels to me like a decisive market lead at one point that they frittered away because they couldn't manage a consistent strategy on messaging. And I guess I need to start trying to find the few stragglers I talk to through Hangouts on other messenger services.

basch 8y ago
aol - aim yahoo - yahoo messenger microsoft - msn, skype google - talk, voice, hangouts basically every one took too long to adapt to either web or mobile.
- cwyers 8y ago
  Yes, well, I can understand why mobile was hard on AOL. I have a harder time understanding why the maker of the most popular mobile platform couldn't get their messaging story straight.

irrational 8y ago

Google is shutting down a product? That is so shocking. To be honest, this is the exact reason we didn't go with Google Cloud. We have zero trust that they won't just shut it off one day, no matter what they might claim. I do use google mail and google docs, but I always make sure I have anything important saved in a separate location so I'm prepared when these products are inevitably shut off.

com2kid 8y ago

At one point Hangouts was super easy to use. Send someone a link and they could join. The interface was iterated on repeatedly until it got to the point that I could barely figure out how in the world to invite people to join a Hangout without having at least a few people run into problems. It is my belief that Uberconference exists because Google dropped the ball so badly with Hangouts. For a brief moment, Hangouts let us live in an amazing future where group video chats happened spontaneously, and then someone had to iterate.

nouseforaname 8y ago
My take: we need to stop incentivizing "innovation" where everything needs to be rewritten every couple months just so someone can "disrupt" something. You know what it really is? It's a bunch of product people, all of who want to be Steve Jobs II, looking at the handful of innovative products Apple made over the last couple of decades and trying to achieve something similar results every single quarter. The problem? We've raised a whole generation of people who think that's not how you make products people love. We've have a whole generation of people who focus 100% on the ideation phase and 0% on the nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback. This fits into a larger theory I have that basically disruptive startups are the weeds of the ecosystem, but they aren't old growth trees. Call me old fashioned but I'm looking forward to the day "disruptive" companies based on "growth hacking" are replaced by some giant redwood trees that will stand the test of time as they (slowly) soar into the sky.
- mciak 8y ago
  This doesn’t really hold true in China —- Steve Jobs is revered there but their startup scene is heavily oriented towards iterating and pivoting
- derefr 8y ago
  You're talking like these are the same people ideating and then dropping products over and over. No: the people who build each product, even at Google, certainly enter a "nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback" phase with that product. The "problem", if you want to call it that, is that there are always new product people joining the company. And what the heck are they going to do to get recognized and promoted, if they don't build a new fiefdom to call their own? The actual question I have about Google and its business strategy, is why these new products always seem to displace old products (and their teams), rather than resulting in the internal equivalent of a merger. I can see good reason to have four teams building four distinct web VoIP clients, if one of them is the "flagship" one and three of them are experiments. I can also imagine one of those "experiments" getting really popular. But why should that result in the "flagship" dying? Why not just merge the teams together, and put the team from the "experiment" in charge of the pooled UX design talent for a new release of the "flagship" client?

JorgeGT 8y ago

Ask HN: any other IM client that has Hangout's transparent UI for desktops? I really like how unobtrusive it is.

lldata 8y ago

I will never adopt a google product again. g+ may be a total failure hangouts may be the less popular chat product But for me and my kids this was the channels we used when they grew up. We have so much history in our family chat and so many photos shared on google+. So now they just shut it down and don't even bother to migrate 10 years of my life to whatever is meant to replace those products. We are a generation who will leave nothing behind.

acqq 8y ago
Some time ago there was that comics about the "Chad's garage": https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/ The most interesting point is, "Chad" is really actively promoting his garages as something the people should definitely use... until he changes his opinion from time to time which garage and if at all the people should use this or that, and then lets people figure out what should they do next. And "Chad" is very rich and powerful, so people are attracted. Nice shelves every time.
Iwan-Zotow 8y ago
> We are a generation who will leave nothing behind. Lucky you I have 12Tb of backups - I don't know what to do with it
derefr 8y ago
> We have so much history in our family chat I don't think any IM chat product has ever promised to keep your history. They all let you "scroll back" on a best-effort basis, but I don't know of any IM chat service where the availability of historical messages is part of the semantics of the service. It's just... not what they're for. If you want the semantics of "real-time chat with history", what you actually want is a business collaboration tool, like Slack or its competitors. Businesses want records of meetings and the ability to dredge up stuff somebody said once, and are willing to pay for it, so services designed with business productivity in mind tend to have these semantics. (And even then, I don't think Slack makes any guarantees that it'll retain the history of your private DMs, only the history of your public channels. Exporting an archive of a Slack workspace doesn't get you archives of the DMs. So it would seem that, even for a business, the semantics of one-to-one conversations are more ephemeral than not.)

gigatexal 8y ago

Why do they insist on putting out useful products only to cancel them? Wtf is wrong with them?

cronix 8y ago
I'm not sure, but I've noticed the result is that I'm consciously using fewer and fewer google services. The more they keep doing this (just abandoning products, or charging astronomically more for them), the less likely I am to use their other services - or new ones, because I don't trust that they'll be around tomorrow. If you continuously show someone you're not stable or reliable, eventually they'll take the hint and believe you. I hope that's what they're going for because it's working. This year there's just been a lot of this with Inbox, G+, Maps increases, and now Hangouts.

ce4 8y ago

Android Police' headline is spot on: "Report: Google killing Hangouts in 2020, probably launching 8 new messaging services in its place" [0]. Mayur Kamat was HO's product manager until 2015 and has posted a few updates on G+ until he left Google, probably because Hangouts was internally about to be abandoned. Thats when I realized Hangouts fate and started looking elsewhere. I vividly remember his remark around the time of the Hangouts 4.0 release [1]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :). Good stuff is coming.": Alas, it wasn't. Edit: Maybe adding that name was wrong, my intention was not to blame any single person. Fact is: I liked Google Talk (and Hangouts) a lot for its superior abilities back then: Federation with XMPP, cross device compatibility, superior synch, possibly reach anyone with a G account, simultaneous login from different devices, permanent cloud based history, working search. It seemed so easy to win at that time. [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/30/report-google-killing-hangouts-in-2020-probably-will-launch-8-new-messaging-services-in-its-place/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/30/report-google-killi... [1] https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE

bpye 8y ago
I can believe he and his team wanted to make Hangouts better. Seems nobody else was on their side though.
- ce4 8y ago
  Absolutely no blaming on him. He was responsible for Microsoft Messenger (if i'm not mistaken) before and the uncertainty with Google chat products (Allo, Duo, Hangouts Meet and who knows what else) is continuing without him.
ehsankia 8y ago
What have we come to when a tired silly meme is called "spot on" in the top comment on HackerNews.

elvirs 8y ago

Google needs to hire Satya Nadella as the CEO.

lwansbrough 8y ago

Big surprise! Another useful Google service gets put down. Why even bother launching products if you’re just gonna kill them after 2 years?

monksy 8y ago

Maybe someone serious can improve XMPP and deploy that.

garysahota93 8y ago

Suggestion of the day: They should integrate Google Voice + Android Messages / RCS to make a true iMessage competitor (with encryption / web sync / etc) AND THEN replace all references of _consumer_ Hangouts/Messaging with this new service. Here's where they could integrate it: -Gmail (as either the hangouts widget replacement or a new Gmail Addon) -Google Maps (so that any conversations you have show up in your main messages app too) -YouTube (why did they even make YouTube Messages? Put this in there so those messages show up in this unified app) -Google Sheets/Docs/Slides (so all comments / conversations can then be seen & referenced in this unified app) -Google Assistant Conversations (so you can see what you've written, but also have the conversation handy - similar, but more streamlined, to how it was/is in Allo) -Duo (so it's tightly integrated & conversations just magically work - similar to FaceTime/iMessage) -Google One (so all customer support conversations can also be bundled & seen in one unified view) -Hangouts Chat / Hangouts Meet (so if you use those services, they have a channel in this app too) -Anywhere else you use a Google service to type things! This would be the ULTIMATE messaging app. Here, I'll even throw in ways to monetize (so that it can live on forever): -You have your main chats, but also all these premium "channels"/"add-ons" (like the ones above) that outside business could integrate into within this app. Charge them similar to how WhatsApp is doing it -Create an add-on store for stickers/fonts/themes (similar to FB Messenger) but integrate into Play store for more revenue) -Sell this service to GSuite customers as a call center / messaging-based customer support service -Create an SMS api for developers and charge for its use (like Twilio and company) No ads. No subscription service (though I'd happily pay $1 per year - which at their scale could be billions). No hassle. No fragmentation. No problems. World hunger solved /end rant P.S. - If anyone wants to make this service, I'd happily co-found a company to do exactly this.

dashmatte 8y ago
ill give u some m,oney

jpeeler 8y ago

I've often gone out of my way to encourage people who want to message me to use hangouts in order to have a better chatting experience (versus SMS). And since I have Google Fi, the hangouts integration was perfect such that people who I couldn't convince to use hangouts would text me and I'd still have all the nice message synchronization features in the same app (which as far as I know nothing else offers - a web based client that's not dependent on the phone being available for receiving SMS). All that to say, I'll be sad to lose such nice integration with SMS. Although I can see Google still providing hangouts to Google Fi customers, I think it's probably time to jump ship at this point. Does anybody know if Matrix supports e2e encrypted chat yet? I don't really follow the project closely, but if this issue is up to date then it's not quite there yet: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779. I realize that bug is for the web client, but I'd feel better anyway knowing one of the biggest clients is using the feature.

timwis 8y ago

What about Hangouts calling (inbound/outbound) with your Google voice number? I'm moving from the US to the UK next month and was hoping to maintain my US number by porting it to Google Voice and using Hangouts calls. Anyone know an alternative?

cordite 8y ago

What will happen to Google voice texting through hangouts?

belltaco 8y ago

So they're willing to keep Gmail which isn't cheap to host and develop free but want to shutdown Google Chat? It feels like this is because Gmail brings in the moolah by making the user to sign in to Google.com, which means all their searches in other browser windows and tabs are tracked to that account leading to user data being collected to be targeted by advertisers. But they don't want to monetize chat data, either because it's not very useful or because of potential backlash, thus they can shut it down to save costs.

brody182 8y ago

what about google voice? will it shut down also?

jakelarkin 8y ago

this is basically what happens when BigTechCorp leaves its product decisions to the competitive empire building machinations of middle managers with 4 year vesting

angel_j 8y ago

LOL, most of the replies here are about how google fucked up, and sucks at stuff, yet this here HN Frontihspost is a dead-ass PR campaign for their paid work/collaboration tools; hangouts has probably been a technical success, so it's going business class only. we use https://talky.io/ https://talky.io/

anoncoward111 8y ago

Why? It's one of the best messaging platforms out there. Everyone I know has an email account. It is easier to reach me by gmail (and thus hangouts) than it is to reach me by phone, because my phone has bad service. Why on earth would they kill one of their best and most popular services? I don't use FB messenger at all, whatsapp reveals my phone number, Skype is an ABSOLUTE joke, and not everyone has Line, Viber, Telegram and so on.

int_19h 8y ago

IM in general is such a mess. All I really want is to have a single ID that people can use to text me from any device they might have (without having to install a special app, because they won't do it just for me), and that I can receive on any device that I have. We did this for email decades ago; why is IM not there yet?

dasil003 8y ago
Because email was not designed by capitalists.
- tomcam 8y ago
  Soviets or Chinese? I keep forgetting which non-capitalists designed email.
  - pers0n 8y ago
    He just means it wasn’t designed for the purpose or future hope of profits

rhizome 8y ago

Google should claw back bonuses and promotions involved in creating these services that get assassinated, to get people thinking more long-term. While I intensely dislike Google's product management, I feel like there might be a point in their favor that these developers or teams who are driven to only launch new stuff instead of maintaining and enhancing the old stuff are creating CS nightmares that can't be refactored, can't be extended, and the original developers may not even be found there anymore. In other words, to be fair to Google, this may be a problem of their own incentives.

SwellJoe 8y ago
Do you really think the team that made, say, Google Talk, were the ones who wanted to kill it and push everyone to a different product? I don't know who made either one, but I would be shocked if the decision maker that pulled the plug had anything to do with the creation of the product. I, personally, don't like to kill my babies. Clawing back bonuses for something out of the control of the engineers seems like a dystopian nightmare, and any company that tried it would, hopefully, die a fiery death after an exodus of talent to more reasonable employers.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  > I, personally, don't like to kill my babies. I do. Software isn't my progeny or legacy. It is the tools in my workshop. If I can use one tool to do the work of five, I'll gladly downsize to declutter and simply my life. Finding self-worth in the longevity of tools is an emotional anti-pattern.
  - deong 8y ago
    I think you're taking him a bit too literally. In these examples, you're not looking at simplifying anything. You're not getting rid of unneeded code. You're getting rid of debugged and stable code in favor of writing something new from scratch because fuck all knows why.
    - 8y ago

zanny 8y ago

I'll get to my real pain point - anyone know of a replacement VOIP solution like Hangouts dialer that isn't subscription based? I've been giving my Hangouts number to people forever because its more convenient to have every device I have ring when someone uses the old PSTN but its not worth a recurring bill to me.

f055 8y ago

GOGON: Get off Google, now. :P Weird things are going to happen if Google were to shrink: paid gmail, premium search, subscription navigation in maps, lock screen ads in android, and hard monetisation of user data. A giant doesn’t go away without a fight, but Google users are not its customers, just data in its products, so...

kenhwang 8y ago

Good thing they're giving a year's notice similar to their enterprise SLAs, right?

sandyhatches 8y ago

I use Hangouts every single day, all day. It's the only app that let's me both chat and SMS from any device I have. I'll miss it very much when it's gone, as there is simply no replacement :/

wtmt 8y ago

Looks like Google is shutting down most of the consumer focused platforms where someone in the organization believes it’s expensive and not making money like selling ads does. I’m confident on Gmail and Maps staying around for the long term. The rest of the consumer side platforms could be removed or replaced (yet again).

clickme_zsh 8y ago

Google needs to focus on their current trend of killing their apps/services. It is surely affecting brand image and value.

phreack 8y ago

At this point, what do Googlers even use to chat internally? Slack? Skype?

amerine 8y ago
My experience so far in 2018 is they communicate via gmail messages and gdoc comments
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  "Man, if only we worked for a large software conglomerate... then we wouldn't have to use Cisco phones or communicate through Excel documents!"

chappi42 8y ago

You don't pay - what do you expect? Use Threema, Signal or Telegram; likely a more sustainable experience.

pmlnr 8y ago
You don't pay for those either, what makes you think it will be around in a few years? Go XMPP, Matrix, SIP - you can self-host these under your own domain, or actually pay for service, or with plain old SMS.
- chappi42 8y ago
  Threema is a paid app. Signal (Telegram) is open source and the chat is a core service for their providers. I.e. more important than Hangout for Google.

ttty 8y ago

I don't know about you but I hated it. Takes ages to open up and is buggy. I have a S8 so you can't say that hardware is a problem. Just low quality Android app. I still use it because has good prices when calling abroad.

nwellinghoff 8y ago

Can we just all go back to irc already...jezzzz

xte 8y ago

Tying to leave Google as much as I can (hoping for Purism phone or something else to ditch Android, web part already done) I do not feel the loss... The real problem is that SFLPhone (now Ring) lost somewhat its way and Jitsi substantially do the same...