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Source: Google Allo will be officially shut down soon
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoIRC it is. Can Google not see the image that they project anymore?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rubatuga 8y agoSeriously what the fuck is google doing?
- TwoNineA 8y agoThrowing shit at wall until something sticks? Example: Google Talk, Messages, Hangouts, Allo
- barry-cotter 8y agoI still miss Google Chat. I spent at least a hundred hours using that, then they changed it to Google Talk and I used it maybe three more hours. Trash fire.
- Phrodo_00 8y agoI miss both of those because they supported XMPP, but they dropped that as soon as they started gaining market share.
- pvg 8y agoWasn't chat just an extension of Google Talk into the gmail web client?
- barry-cotter 8y agoGchat worked both in the browser and years after I started using it in browser as an app. Google Talk was a forced downgrade of a working app to an app that used way more data to not work for most practical purposes. I am ignorant of the technical details but Gchat worked and that was the first and last time I’ve spent more than ten minutes on a google chat platform. They had a massive base of users in everyone who had a gmail account, many of whom used Gchat and they threw it away. It’s like if Apple managed to so badly screw up iMessage that it disappeared from use.
- pvg 8y agoYeah I think you have the history somewhat backwards. Gtalk was the original app and then it got integrated into Gmail as well. The abandonment of Gtalk and related bits is definitely one of those weird and seemingly inexplicable user-hating moves.
- taytus 8y agoWho else remembers Google Wave?
- janzij 8y agoGoogle Talk was simply too good to exist. :( https://i.imgur.com/U6X92u8.png https://i.imgur.com/U6X92u8.png
- agumonkey 8y agoSo light it was floating over the wall
- gomox 8y agoNow there's also "Meet". And "Duo". Or how about that time when they tried to merge SMS into Hangouts? What a trainwreck.
- zmmmmm 8y agoI think it's worse than that. It does stick. They actually hate it when it sticks, because that is when it becomes a career sink. That is, too important to the business for people to leave it behind but not important enough that maintaining it is promotion worthy. I strongly suspect that the reason so many products get shut down is not to do with financials or the product's actual usage and adoption, but because the there's a valley of death in which association with these products during this phase of their lifecycle is a negative career move within Google. So most likely really good engineers flee these products because they might become successful more than because they are failures / failing.
- thwy12321 8y agoOnly promoting people who launch new products, so they end up with a ton of useless new products.
- velobro 8y agoLooks like Google is finally discovering they are just a SCUMMY advertising company and shouldn't be building consumer products that don't directly feed into that advertising.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThat would be a brilliant insight actually. I would love it if they didn't even try to make consumer products.
- SMLP 8y agoIt was a great idea... but then so was google plus... google buzz... the problem with a good idea is the people go where the people are. If they had only just bundled it as the default on Android One it may have just worked.
- egwynn 8y agoNon-amp link: https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/ Also, s/it’s/its/
- alphabettsy 8y agoHangouts and now this? Their track-record is one of the reasons I don’t adopt personally or recommenced new Google services to friends and family.
- kyrra 8y agoFYI, there was an update to that article that stated (from the lead for Hangouts) that Hangouts has no set shutdown yet, and they plan on transitioning everyone to Hangouts Chat/Meet before Hangouts Classic goes down. see: https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...
- alphabettsy 8y agoI read that, but I don’t have much faith. And I would hardly recommend something to the average person in my family when I expect major changes that require them to relearn how to do things. There’s a reason I just recommend FaceTime or Skype to family members, it’s consistency.
- threatofrain 8y agoBut on the App Store, you can see that people fondly refer to Duo as the FaceTime for those without FaceTime. If Duo goes away without replacement, I think people will actually miss it.
- nattaylor 8y agoI got a Duo ad Hulu yesterday. I think it will survive
- chimeracoder 8y ago> FYI, there was an update to that article that stated (from the lead for Hangouts) that Hangouts has no set shutdown yet, and they plan on transitioning everyone to Hangouts Chat/Meet before Hangouts Classic goes down. What does that even mean? As far as I can tell, the whole difference between "Hangouts [Classic]" and "Hangouts Chat/Meet" is that the former was for consumers and the latter was for businesses/enterprises. So they're shutting down the consumer version and moving all consumers to the business/enterprise version of the same product? That would just turn it back into what Hangouts was before they introduced Chat/Meet in the first place!
- unsignedint 8y agoPersonally, I will miss Hangouts more than Allo, and RCS is not an direct replacement for Hangouts either. One thing I hate about Allo is its use of phone number as user ID, so the same goes for RCS. Just because I'm willing to chat with someone really doesn't mean I am willing to provide phone numbers to them. Edit: Repeated Allo, where I meant RCS.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Personally, I will miss Hangouts more than Allo, and RCS is not an direct replacement for Hangouts either. The replacement for Hangouts is more Hangouts, not RCS (that is, per the article, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet are being opened to consumers next year, and are the official replacement for Hangouts classic for consumers, just as they already were for enterprise.) > One thing I hate about Allo is its use of phone number as user ID, so the same goes for Allo. I assume one of these Allos is supposed to be RCS?
- Raidion 8y agoI agree, I'm of the opinion "hangouts" isn't dead. I don't see them removing a chat option from gmail. So far, they've pretty much kept the consumer and enterprise gmail experience the same. I feel like Google knows that just setting an if(enterprise) and hiding hangouts in gmail would just piss a LOT of people off, so I full expect them to find the brand with the best available and flexible tech stack, and just merge hangouts and whatever else into one thing that they'll call something different but will still be mostly the same, in the exact same spot in gmail.
- russley 8y agoDuo can't be that far behind then, can it? I can't even remember the last time I thought about it.
- xeromal 8y agoI think Duo has had more success.
- woodruffw 8y agoGoogle dumped an incredible amount of money into Allo's marketing at my (large state) university -- they plastered many buildings with full-length advertisements, filled all of the local businesses with pamphlets, and even drove students around campus in weird little (electric?) buggies[1]. Despite all that, I don't think I know anybody who installed (much less regularly used) Allo. Edit: They also bought Snapchat filters that were geofenced to the campus. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=allo+campus+car https://www.google.com/search?q=allo+campus+car
- whitepoplar 8y agoPeople can smell when a product isn't earnest. From the beginning, Allo smelled like a directive by a Google VP to "get messaging market share."
- GuiA 8y agoNot that I’m defending Allo, but I don’t know how useful your distinction is. What is an earnest product then? Any product released by a company that has bills to pay is released to “get market share”.
- smt88 8y agoI assumed GP meant that there's nothing in it for the user, only for the company. Other examples include carrier-branded apps that come preinstalled on phones.
- whitepoplar 8y agoExactly this.
- ttmb 8y agoIn this context, an earnest product could be a messaging product that aimed to solve a problem with other existing products and had a coherent story explaining this. Allo from the outside seemed to solve no problem other than "people are using messaging platforms that aren't ours".
- xnx 8y agoI complain about Google having too many competing/overlapping products, so I can't really complain when they close/merge them. The best time to shutdown Allo was before it launched, the second best time is now.
- drewg123 8y agoFrom an Xoogler's perspective, the launches are all about the promos. Eg, just think about all those engineers who would not have gotten a promotion because then they would not have had a product launch in their promo packet.
- sigfubar 8y agoThe technical term for this is “circle jerk”.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- killjoywashere 8y agoVery interesting - other large orgs also accept waste in the name of talent development, but I'm not sure I've seen it at this scale. Do scientific advances in papers also count as product launches, or do you have to put a thing in the world?
- gervase 8y agoPreviously, they made a hard push to make sure that their science was "applied" science, but that's softened a bit in their pitches lately [0]. The current iteration has a 4-axis evaluation metric [1], where the value of a given project is measured by the area of the polygon. So, you can make theoretical advances that don't go into products, but it's better for you if they do. [0]: Disclaimer: I've been recruited by Google's research arm, but haven't worked there. [1]: https://ai.google/research/philosophy/ https://ai.google/research/philosophy/
- 8y ago
- gundmc 8y agoHacker News: LOL! Google has so many messaging apps, their product strategy sucks! Google: They're right, we need to focus our messaging strategy. Let's consolidate our platforms. Hacker News: OMG! Google deprecates everything! Classic Google
- drstewart 8y agoEveryone except Google knew Allo was a bad idea before it even launched though.
- moonsun 8y agoPersonally, I'd be on board with Allo if it was incognito mode by default with no option for the currently default mode.
- iainmerrick 8y agoThat wouldn’t be a Google product.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoYep, you can see this exact process more seriously sidethread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18613860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18613860 . >> I complain about Google having too many competing/overlapping products, so I can't really complain when they close/merge them. But I tend to agree that "Hacker News" is right to complain in both cases. Messaging is one of those areas where the existence of products you (the consumer) don't use can hurt you, so criticism #1 stuck. The only fix played right into criticism #2. Does that mean #2 isn't a real problem? No, in general it's even worse than problem #1. The real lesson to be drawn here is that, if you get into a "bad" situation, you may not have a "good" way out. This message traditionally got hammered home by tragedies, but tragedies are massively unpopular with modern audiences.
- baroffoos 8y agoGoogle starts and ends products so fast I can't even tell you what the current google messaging system is.
- thwy12321 8y agoGoogle's main problem is that they only promote people for releasing new products. So all the engineers and product people are highly incentive to only work on new launches. Doesn't even matter what it is. So now they end up with all these garbage products laying around, none of which make them any money.
- baroffoos 8y agoThey also only care about stupid metrics. One google dev said they got given an old project and they found it was full of bugs and reporting loads of bad info so the dev added a bunch of tests that picked up on the bugs and bad data and then they were denied the promotion because the errors logged from the program they were working on went up since they started working on it.
- billylindeman 8y agothis kind of nonsense will be the death of google
- baroffoos 8y agoI'm not so sure. Googles core product is search and that has been fairly rock solid as long as it has existed. A lot of the fuckery has been around their other products and I think the company could probably afford to shut down most of them and continue to run fine.
- thwy12321 8y agoI always wonder if the other projects are just retainer projects. They dont really care as much what happens, they just dont want those engineers on the open market.
- erik_seaberg 8y agoI think they saw Microsoft miss the Next Big Thing™, and they're afraid it could happen to them, so they're investing in everything while the AdSense/AdWords cash cows last.
- burger_moon 8y agoDoes anyone have a good alternative for someone who is not tech savvy at all and on an Android phone? I set this up on my mom’s phone because she doesn’t get good enough cell reception at or around her place so an internet based messaging system works best. She is in very poor health and can barely hold the phone so something that doesn’t have a lot of small icons and in general just easy to setup and use would be great.
- jaimex2 8y agoSkype is still everyone's go to.
- cbdumas 8y agoI haven't used Skype outside of work for probably 10 years
- codeulike 8y agoWhy not WhatsApp? Very simple interface, although rumour has it, ads might start appearing soon.
- jayess 8y agoOr Signal, because it's not Facebook.
- secabeen 8y agoSetup a family slack. Works well, full media support. Options for bringing other people in and having family connection there, or you can just DM each other.
- saagarjha 8y agoSlack is significantly more complex than most messaging apps.
- 8y ago
- pacomerh 8y agoAnother one to the cemetery https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- Declanomous 8y agoI don't really think it is fair to include hardware in that list. It makes sense to memorialize the death of a hardware line, but it doesn't really make sense to memorialize every single piece of hardware. That's a bit like memorializing every minor version of software that is superceded by a new version.
- Steltek 8y agoEven then, the list of hardware profiles taking a dirt nap is pretty long. Gone are the budget Nexus phones and any true Android tablets. All they have left are a laughable "flagship" phone, a high end Chromebook, and a kiloton of Nest smart home gadgets.
- AlexandrB 8y agoI miss Sparrow so much :'(
- jaimex2 8y agoGoogle have all but eroded all trust in their chat products. I can't see anyone adopting anything they ever release in the future, they are going to have to purchase an existing successful product. I certainly wasn't going to use Allo or anything else after they killed Hangouts.
- 8ytecoder 8y agoGoogle feels like a company that's run by a bunch of engineers/product managers instead of a product leader with a cohesive vision. Anyone with an iPhone would understand what iMessages is and what FaceTime is. What is what and what you can do with each. Now explain it to me Google - what's your vision? (Or is it "target end state" in engineering speak?) As customers we want (at most) one chat application and one video calling application. What is it going to be? It's the exact same story with Music applications too. Android Music and Google Play Music seems abandoned. YT Music is pushed down the throat with a ton of the features of GPM missing. Subscription pricing keeps changing around. Same story with Gmail/Inbox. One by one I have left all Google's products now. That said, whoever is running Google Maps is a genius. It's one product that gets it right. The fact that overlayed business listing, transit, traffic and now ride share systems ...etc. is just brilliant. We take it for granted. But if Google Maps ended up in the hands of whoever was in charge of their messaging or music strategy we'd have - Google Maps, Google Directions, Google Transit, Google Businesses, Google Restaurants and Google Rides.
- pesmhey 8y agoStraight from the source: On Google's philosophy versus Apple's: "I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, 'You guys are doing too much stuff.' He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We'd like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things."
- AlexandrB 8y agoThat would make sense if all the things Google did has a lifespan of more than a few years.
- londons_explore 8y agoThe lead of Maps spends a large proportion of his time listening to user feedback (some of it even here on HN!). I suspect that's a big part of the reason for the higher quality product.
- 8y ago
- hbcondo714 8y agoSnowden on Google Allo: ‘Don’t Use It’ https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/778588715736260608 https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/778588715736260608
- ravenstine 8y agoCoincidentally, I uninstalled it a few hours ago before even reading this story. Feels good.
- Twirrim 8y agoGood to see the shuttering of Allo. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but one of the big reasons I didn't use Allo was because they keep shuttering their apps. I'm not going to use something I have doubts will last more than a year or two. I just don't have any use for such a product.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hartator 8y agoWhat’s Google recommanded messaging solution now? It seems a mess now.
- martin1975 8y agoWhat's app, Google? (pun intended)
- brownbat 8y agoI usually jump right on board when Google engineers build something new. I must be some kind of masochist. Is there any internal understanding that these head fakes are punishing to fans? Me and my friends were the ones that used plus. And buzz. And wave. Now we're terrified to buy anything on the Play store. I'm arguably a fanboy and even I am starting to worry that humanity might be better off if all the talent at Google was out from under their direct control. If only all the project teams at Google were free agents or in startups where the baseline comparison wasn't constantly asking if their product was as lucrative as advertising... Be Bell Labs and dump your enormous profits into fundamental research with no expectation of return. Or be Softbank and just incubate the world. But paying a bunch of talented engineers to build and maintain things you will kill seems cruel to the engineers, the customers, and maybe even humanity. We already had Signal, et al. We could have used these cycles for other things.
- godelski 8y agoI think Allo is really cool. A lot of the features it had were pretty incredible. BUT besides this I had a lot of problems. 1) It is not privacy oriented. (I still have _enough_ trust to Google that if they explicitly state something as privacy oriented I would believe them. But that's not their business model) 2) No one used it. I have more friends that use Signal than Allo. Even though I liked all the features, those aren't enough to push people over. I feel the only way it would have succeeded is if they completely replaced messenger with allo (I thought that was the plan). But I hope Signal implements some of these features. Really what was useful is inline google searching. Possibly inline DDG searching?
- gammateam 8y agoAint no lie, bye bye byeeeee
- ydnaclementine 8y agoI forgot which HN thread I read this, but an ex-googler said something like: "the most important thing to do for career growth at google is to launch your product, doesn't matter how shit/half assed/etc it is. You don't get credit for maintaining the old stuff." Reading that put a lot of Google's actions into perspective (how many chat clients do they really need?, youtube music, etc)
- jxdxbx 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379394
- jiveturkey 8y agog’bye, allo [brit accent]
- qwerty456127 8y agoThe AI that makes decisions at Google should run for president in Madagascar[1] [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything
- cmcginty 8y agocolor me shocked