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The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

283 points by fastest963 8y ago

paulcarroty 8y ago
Well, now everyone know Google sucks in privacy 'cause doing business on users data. I'm not wonder why their ALL messengers failed.
mikehines 8y ago
Resurrect wave and rule them all
- jaimex2 8y ago
  I love how they are desperately trying to capture the Slack market now... when they had a product that was perfect for it long before Slack.
- herewulf 8y ago
  The best part about Wave was that it was/is federated, so your data isn't completely siloed like basically every other modern app mentioned in this thread. It's more like e-mail. With sufficient resourcing, it could have revolutionized communication.
  - chii 8y ago
    I heard over the grape vine that wave was killed in political maneuvers of management (as they deliberately did not build integrations into email for wave, thus causing adoption issues). The tech is incredibly good! It had so much potential, and yet...
dbcooper 8y ago
Just a conplete mess.
- jaimex2 8y ago
  Its turned into a massive joke. They can create amazing machine learning and AI systems, can't put together a consistent chat app - stuff thats been around since the beginning of the Internet.
  - fencepost 8y ago
    I think that joke must include a dozen highly skilled but poorly socialized engineers in a conference room completely failing to communicate about communicating. I'm just not sure if it's a comedy, a satire or a tragedy.
senectus1 8y ago
The sooner they replace hangouts with something that is fast and more reliable the better. getting tired of the inconsistencies experienced with hangouts.
- navait 8y ago
  Google Meet is the new thing.
nyrulez 8y ago
It has to hurt somewhere inside Google to kill Allo but not Duo. I honestly expected the opposite given the original push behind these apps. The problem with all these messaging experiences is that none of them work well on both dekstop and mobile. They seem to be optimized one way or the other. If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Does Google have another video calling solution similar to Duo to replace it with?
  - dorfsmay 8y ago
    Hangouts?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - Gustomaximus 8y ago
      Hangout was good but it feels like Google whiteanted this product in the hope people would head to Allo/Duo. While in reality they just pushed people away completely. I find it amazing how these decisions are made... it seems like most people here could see the train wreck coming from this at the beginning. Are the descion makers that bad? Did no-one have the guts to discuss how bad these things looked or were they arrogant enought to feel they can fly above market sentiment... I always find it interesting how bad decisions are made in such seemingly obvious circumstances.
tehlike 8y ago
The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words. Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop. Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  > blog post is very confusing at best Yeah, there's clarity at the end, but there could have been a cartoon in 4 frames: Frame 1: icons of Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Messaging Frame 2: Hangouts splits into Meet and Chat (5 things) Frame 3: Duo, Messaging, Meet annd Chat arranged in a 2x2 grid of (messaging, phone/video) x (consumer, business), with Allo still hanging above Frame 4: Allo getting squeezed into Messaging.
  - npunt 8y ago
    You're onto something. This should be a chart though, and encompass the whole scope of Google's attempts at messaging over the years. Plot out all the bundling (Hangouts & G+) and unbundling (Allo's features -> Messages) like xkcd's movie narrative charts: https://xkcd.com/657/ https://xkcd.com/657/ At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.
    - maccam94 8y ago
      Don't forget Talk and Voice
    - csours 8y ago
      https://robots.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march https://robots.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualizatio... Based on one of the most famous visualizations of all times - Napoleon's 1812 invasion of russia
pspeter3 8y ago
I really want to know what is the plan for Project Fi. The Hangouts integration is one of the best aspects of the service
- amyjess 8y ago
  This. If Fi integration with Hangouts goes away without a replacement, I'm cancelling my Fi service and switching to Pinger Textfree Web for text messaging.
joekrill 8y ago
I saw the title and thought: "Finally, they're going to admit to what a mess they've created and propose a way forward". But nope, just a PR fluff post.
dorfsmay 8y ago
The last time I used messages it made a point not to let me chose if I wanted to use SMS vs google own protocol, and I felt I was a weapon for google to bring more users to their ecosystem. The last time I used hello and duo they needed either a phone or a smartphone or both. For me a messaging system should not require to have a phone number and should equally well across a range of devices including Linux desktop. Hangouts and zoom can do it, why would other apps not do it?
- jdofaz 8y ago
  Android Messages is just an SMS/MMS/RCS app, it doesn’t have a google account, it uses your cellular carrier.
robbiemitchell 8y ago
1. What is the difference between Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet? Why are they separate products? 2. What is the difference between Duo and Hangouts?
- codyogden 8y ago
  I can answer #1: Hangouts Chat is a standalone, text chat-only app (chat.google.com), similar in functionality to Slack. It will/does have the ability for third-party developers to create bots, etc. Hangouts Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" type of communications. Both of these (according to this blog) will only be available to G Suite (enterprise) users. Why they are separate products? Who knows.
  - sidjor 8y ago
    They are both available to G Suite - Basic users from start.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    > Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" Yeah, no. Meet is the most equal-among-all video conferencing app I've ever seen. It's ability to promote the speaker to the main window is uncannily good. It is my go-to, and I use it intercontinental and inter-org.
- tensor 8y ago
  1. Hangouts Chat is a text chat app more like slack then anything. Meet is video conferencing like Zoom or Webex. 2. Duo is a video calling app like Facetime or Skype.
bonsai80 8y ago
I may need to read that mess several more times to understand what they're doing, but from what I gather if I just want to do video chat with family with Google stuff, I'll need to use their "Duo" app. Does anyone use that and know if it also works in a browser (preferably Firefox)?
shubidubi 8y ago
How about having only one app where i can simply use messaging and video? why do i need to install 4 different apps for it?
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Because they gave 4 different people a promotion
  - shubidubi 8y ago
    give another promotion to the person who will combine all of them.
    - killjoywashere 8y ago
      pending ...
    - sondh 8y ago
      The problem is right here, it's just gonna end up with 5 different apps. Related xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - stupidbird 8y ago
    Sew them all together and make a Google Messenger centipede.
  - blaisio 8y ago
    That's probably exactly what happened.
- petecox 8y ago
  Why not open the protocol, so I can use the one app for all my cross-service messaging needs? e.g. Pidgin.
  - pferde 8y ago
    Where's the money in that?
microdrum 8y ago
What a joke of a blog post, and what a joke of a company. This isn’t “the latest.” It’s the latest deprecation, and the latest breach of implied warranty to the consumer.
devereaux 8y ago
When google voice was introduced, I ported my phone number. It was nice to use the service. Before that, I had a grandstream ATA. The service was great. Now, everyday feels worse. Last month, I was traveling abroad and had more important things to do than to confirm the cellular number linked to voice was still mine. So google decided not just to stop redirecting phonecalls, but also to stop me from calling using the dialer app. Basically, my "phone privileges" was unilaterally revoked by google because I did not obey the phone number verification procedure. I have previously checked companies like callcentric, but it is now one of my priority. I can't entrust google with my phone service in 2019.
- jdofaz 8y ago
  Callcentric can do sms now if you need that
  - devereaux 8y ago
    Interesting, even if they don't have an SMS API yet. I will have to check again their offer, and see if their native client improved. At the moment I mostly use them for fax and SIP trunking. Even if twilio is good, I'd rather now have everything in one place.
olegious 8y ago
So basically - "If you need to do video calling, use Duo. If you need to send messages Android to Android use Android Messaging. If you need a cross platform messaging service outside of enterprise use Hango...ooops"
Mistri 8y ago
I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling? For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.
- davidbanham 8y ago
  https://appear.in/ https://appear.in/
  - Mistri 8y ago
    While it's not bad, it has many features that are paid-only and the UI isn't perfect... but I suppose I was spoiled by Hangouts. Thanks for the tip.
    - davidbanham 8y ago
      The main reason I still use Google Meet is that appear.in has a full-fat P2P model where your video and audio must stream to every user and vice versa. Even with 4 people that can get pretty taxing on a poor connection. Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.
  - bonsai80 8y ago
    I've liked using that in the past. They seem to require a login now.
    - dorianm 8y ago
      Oh no! Used to be my favorite
    - davidbanham 8y ago
fencepost 8y ago
Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.
- woogiewonka 8y ago
  Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations. Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like. I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.
  - fencepost 8y ago
    Could be worse. They could have named it "Chill"
    - mikelward 8y ago
      Shhh! Don't give them ideas!
- hesarenu 8y ago
  Its WhatsApp expect for Americans users i suppose.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  IRC is the most consistent and stable, just saying ;)
stupidbird 8y ago
How are they still getting this wrong. One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.
- Gustomaximus 8y ago
  I don't think the problem is even one app. They should have had a central board where people set interoperability standards then they can build multiple apps. As long as hangouts could talk with Allo etc it doesn't matter and people can use the one they prefer and it's irelevant to another person's descion. Now Google have dug a deeper hole as there is little change any tech influencer is going to use or promote Google messaging apps to their circle. Personally I'm available on Signal, Skype and WhatsApp and it's going to take a hell of a change to make me care about trying something else.
- woogiewonka 8y ago
  It's like nobody at Google uses an iPhone or has heard of Facetime. "Oh look, there's an app that lets you call and at a tap of a button turns that call into video! I wonder if we should do something similar?" "- nah, that would be too easy."
  - Latteland 8y ago
    I've had that for 10 years with google. I don't understand. I look at a contact while in gmail, click on it to go to hangouts and click the video call button.
- ulfw 8y ago
  It's so many things Google can't decide what they want. Almost all their Google services are login-based. Your gmail login works on search, on youtube, on calendar, on anything really. Yes. On Hangouts too. But not Allo/Duo. Someone thought it would be hipper to throw that out the window and have people use their phone number instead. Cool. Sure. But why make that the only choice for almost a year?
- awill 8y ago
  It really is that simple. It's really shocking that a company like Google has failed over and over at this. Apple nailed it on the first try. Both iMessage and FaceTime. What's more frustrating is that Google had Google Talk. It was super successful and really well liked. Rather than maintain and improve it, they threw it away.
jvagner 8y ago
which one will be built into gmail in the future? one of the greatest advantages google has is gmail/hangouts native integration in the browser. if they lose that, i think a good bit of what makes gmail attractive goes with it. i say this as an iOS user.
justinplouffe 8y ago
If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  Yes and no. You can use their Messages web client, but it's still going to be SMS to and from your phone. It's a contrived and pretty ugly solution IMO. https://messages.android.com/ https://messages.android.com/
  - briandear 8y ago
    Good grief. It seems like they are doing everything possible to not make something as good as Apple Messages. Data chat without a phone number, interoperability with conventional SMS and the ability to start an instant FaceTime. And with Group FaceTime, it’s even more compelling. You can even do audio only or start a real phone call or send a video or audio message, all in one place. Other than org politics, I can’t understand why Google messaging services are a convoluted mess. I need a flowchart just to understand it all.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
dkhenry 8y ago
What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete them.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  Signal and Allo actually have a similar number of installs, they're both in the 10-50m installs bucket in the Play store. I use Signal, but it's fine at best, but it's not really going to break out of it's niche.
  - briandear 8y ago
    That doesn’t count all of the iOS people that also use Signal. I use Signal and Apple Messages and didn’t even know Allo existed. I have a perhaps irrational fear of using messaging from Google or Facebook because they have lost my trust. Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      Why do people ever switch chat apps? Besides shutdowns, it's because the new app does something the old one doesn't. Signal's pitch was easy encrypted messaging, but now there are apps that fill that slot, even Facebook Messenger has e2e encrypted chat, so there's not a lot of reason for Google to invest there. Google Duo has succeeded as an app known for making video calls, which is as much a marketing/positioning achievement as it is a technical one. There are lots of people declaring they will use a Google product in this thread, but of course no one is going to use a nonexistent product that people imagine as a clone of what already exists. Unless Google finds an "in", they're not going to get anywhere, even with whatever perfect app HN imagines.
    - wpietri 8y ago
sorenjan 8y ago
I'm pretty sure this blog post was forced due to the recent articles about Hangouts and Allo on 9to5google.com [0], [1]. Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution. If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now. [0] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d... [1] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/
- ehsankia 8y ago
  > Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person Isn't that recursive thinking? No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers. > I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol I'm curious, but could RCS be interchangeably used both through provider and through a host such as Google? Could Google not host their own RCS backend?
  - grahn 8y ago
    > No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers. You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.
DevKoala 8y ago
Google is discountinuing Allo next year. I have never been affected by one of these decisions by Google since I try to stay away from their ecosystem, but I am confident this is a way to lose user trust.
reasonablemann 8y ago
Lots of money. Lots of ideas. No focus.
niftich 8y ago
I should take my timeline of Google's chat fumbles [1] and keep it updated. A lot has happened since. But Allo's stagnation has been known since April 2018 [2], and "classic" Hangouts' decline has long been suspected in light of the new services also prefixed by the same name. This post seemed like it might cut the BS and explain what's going on, but it's tinged with PR platitudes and is unacceptably unclear and nonchalant about "classic" Hangouts' fate. They're basically saying they'll shut it down soon but not quite yet. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16886921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16886921
ericabiz 8y ago
I count six different apps here: Allo Duo Messages Hangouts Hangouts Chat Hangouts Meet I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up? This is ridiculous.
- sdinsn 8y ago
  Chat & Meet are for businesses, and Allo is ending. So the vast majority need to only keep up with 3.
  - ericabiz 8y ago
    There’s a Googler in here who wrote a comment on this post: “I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.” I just don’t know. I’m at a complete loss for words on how Google can screw this up so badly. We actually use Hangouts every day for our business. I have been advocating a move to Slack.
    - nicoburns 8y ago
      We found we got a nice boost in call quality when we moved to from hangouts to slack. zoom.us is also good.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Don't forget the native Android SMS app.
  - fastest963 8y ago
    That's Messages
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      No, "Messages" is the successor to the now discontinued "Messaging" app. They would coexist when "Messages" had to be downloaded from the Play store.
brendanmc6 8y ago
I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal. In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be. I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized. And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to. And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work. And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number... On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare. I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said. What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece) EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
- mrkstu 8y ago
  This is the brilliance of iMessage where it gets critical mass- fallback to SMS but pushing the iMessage identity tied to an account that follows you to new phones/devices. I think that iMessage network effect is a big reason for the steady market share growth of iPhone in the US- none of the competitive apps have cross-generational appeal, just iMessage.
sorenjan 8y ago
Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gaming circles. Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.
- pavanagrawal123 8y ago
  I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.
    - pavanagrawal123 8y ago
      Try https://preview.web.skype.com/ https://preview.web.skype.com/ It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)
      - pmlnr 8y ago
        > Browser not supported > Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience. > Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer. That is on up to date Firefox on Debian unstable. Bravo.
m0dest 8y ago
It's great that they've simplified their story. Totally makes sense now. Texting app and AV app for consumers, texting app and AV app for teams. But this leaves a giant hole in their consumer texting product. Have they given up on making a private, cross-platform texting product for consumers? Messages seems like it must use an Android phone as the user's primary device – as SMS requires OS integration and presumably RCS does too. And neither SMS or RCS are private. Carriers have full visibility to all messages. That's light-years less secure than the end-to-end encryption offered by iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, and even less private than the former Hangouts. (Say what you will about Google, I'd trust them with my private messages far more than any pair of cellular carriers.)
hossbeast 8y ago
From any of these 6 Google apps, I should be able to message/voice as appropriate, to users on any of the other apps. Protocol over apps. It's the only way forward.
zodvik 8y ago
Hangouts Chat is such a botched launch. It is backwards compatible with single user chat and not group chats. It effectively ensures that people cannot completely migrate to it. The overhead of keeping 2 apps and getting the same notification twice was too much - ended up going back to classic Hangouts.
technofiend 8y ago
One of the absolute top features of Hangouts is indexing chats into your Gmail search results. And yet here goes Google yet again applying the foot gun to a useful feature. Do they buy bullets in bulk or something?
- shaklee3 8y ago
  Which, oddly enough, cannot be search on mobile.
yodon 8y ago
Genuine question here, as I've read both the post and all the comments here and I still can't figure this out: Does this blog post say google's consumer text messaging strategy is now "send an email?" I read the post as saying Messages is for Android consumer text messaging, Duo for cross-platform consumer video, and Hangouts for enterprise text and video. That doesn't seem to leave anything for friends doing text chat outside of Android.
- procinct 8y ago
  I think it's more "send an sms". I could be reading this post wrong though.
  - yodon 8y ago
    > "send an sms" I guess that's better than telling people to fax 8 track tapes, but not by much
sam0x17 8y ago
I use hangouts as my primary communication app with my spouse on desktop and android, and have since the google talk days. Will this no longer after the change and if not what is the replacement?
ronreiter 8y ago
Oh my god - Google really has the worst product management etiquette in the world. It’s not hard. Look around you for what works and what doesn’t and copy that. The post is also confusing and hard to get the bottom line out of it. Just write “we are killing Allo”.
- markmark 8y ago
  Literally just copy imessage feature for feature, or are they too beholden to carriers to do that?
jknz 8y ago
FAQ: how start a video call using Google products? Answer: Go to Gmail and send an email to the other party "can you Skype now?". Literally. I had to schedule a video call recently by email. There is simply no formulation to schedule a video call using the name of one of google's products. "Can you Hangout tomorrow?", "Can you Duo tomorrow", "Can you chat with Allo tomorrow?". Nothing would work without confusing the other party with some probability. "Can you Skype tomorrow" always works, with everyone, no confusion.
- ndespres 8y ago
  To which many would reply, "Yes, I can Skype with you. I am at work, so I'll be using my Skype for Business program which recently replaced Lync. My Skype will talk to yours, right? Oh it says here that Skype for Business (which used to be Lync (which used to be Office Communicator)), is now Teams, so uhh can you just call me on my phone instead. Thanks
  - beart 8y ago
    Skype for Business and Teams are not the same app. That said, I've found Teams very lacking in exactly the way Skype is not, and Skype lacking in exactly the way Teams is not which is very frustrating.
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      SfB is deprecated, and Teams is designated its replacement.
- hkmurakami 8y ago
  Creating a google calendar event with an embedded link to a hangouts room works pretty well in my experience.
  - pookeh 8y ago
    Second this. Clicking on the add hangouts link is dead simple and does exactly what the OP wants
bubblethink 8y ago
I think the main reason people use hangouts at all is because everyone has gmail open all the time, or at least everyone has a gmail account. It's just laziness for the most part. Not that chat is that hard a problem or that hangouts is so good. If you have to go to newshinymessenger.google.com at any point, the advantage will die.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
runn1ng 8y ago
"yeah we realize our messenger offer is confusing, but we are too big of a mess internally so we will keep it confusing. sorry!"
HHalvi 8y ago
My takeaway from this post was google saying : We acknowledge that Hangouts, Duo, Allo exist and we think they were orphaned for too long and we are adopting them back. Hangouts to me is like Flash, useful but so out of touch with everyday needs of an ever evolving world and sadly forgotten. I love Google Photos, Duo as well as Messenger (SMS App) and i hope they don't end up in Google's Graveyard sometime soon.
uuill 8y ago
I use Hangouts as a desktop messaging client to communicate with my Mom. She has a Chromebook, but no Android phone. I also use Hangouts (from my desktop) to communicate with friends via an ongoing chat stream (with the occasional video chat). My use case seems to be falling through the cracks with Google's new approach. I guess I will be signing my Mom up with a Google Voice number and switching to Skype for for my video chats.
warent 8y ago
I wonder if what they're doing is trying to refine each individual aspect of communication as much as possible in various apps so that later they can merge them all into one massive super-app. So, email, texting, messaging, video chat, voice, all merged into "Google Human" or something crazy.
V-eHGsd_ 8y ago
as a xoogler, I wish they would've titled this, "an update on allo".
millstone 8y ago
I've been in many come-to-Jesus meetings wherein Leadership acknowledges their strategic failures, then busts out a presentation detailing the New Strategy, consisting of mild tweaks of the Existing Strategy. Mild tweaks are great because they spare Leadership the pain of making hard decisions. > And by refocusing on Messages and Duo for consumers and Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team collaboration "Instead of working on five products, we're 'refocusing' down to four products." Right. This has the stench of a post-faction justification that expertly avoids stepping on too many toes. IME Leadership gets axed by Senior Leadership not too long after.
- joenathanone 8y ago
  They also fail to address Google Voice, their VOIP/SMS-OIP app. Here's to hoping they don't cancel it down the line too.
ulfw 8y ago
It's beyond ridiculous to say 'we failed to gain traction with a free solution that anybody can install on any Android and iPhone and use it TODAY' and replace that with 'but we will succeed in gaining traction with a solution that only runs on a few select phones and need carrier support and where you never know if the person you are trying to message has a compatible device on a compatible carrier". In what world do Google product people live these days?
jordanthoms 8y ago
This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.
- Groxx 8y ago
  I'm also one of those that was / is still sad about losing XMPP integration. Highly customizable alerts are borderline essential if you have a lot of threads going, but hangouts seems determined to prevent you from doing any of that.
  - draw_down 8y ago
    Makes sense, unfortunately commercial products universally abandon those open protocols at some point.
- smt88 8y ago
  Want to know an even more stupid rebrand? A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it. The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough. Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.
rmykhajliw 8y ago
I was a user of hangouts for the last 10 years already since a closed for public alpha-beta. It was wonderful product for companies, for teams. It was so easy to create a meeting (because it had an integration with google calendar) invite everyone, add some people phone number to join the same conversation. It just worked and it was the best on the market. Then Google decided to kill this product one by one removing useful features like: conference call, external plugins, jabber support (jabber allowed to easily integrate with other corporate stuff). Finally Hangouts transformed from a must-have-thing into another-chat-app-none-use. I waited a long time, but there's still NO DESKTOP client. I suppose Google believe in mobile first world etc. but REALITY says 99% of corporate work's done DESKTOP. And web based-chat is not a solution at all. Before I can use alternative clients like psy, it wasn't really convenient but it worked well, until it was killed. Death of Hangouts was predictable due to lack attention to the detail and building a wall of ignorance of their users. By the way mobile version hangouts may built on electron because it's the SLOWEST application on my iPhone.
- krackers 8y ago
  What's really annoying is that they killed off the one thing that was closest to a desktop client [the one seen here: https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extension/raw/master/screenshots/chrome.png https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extensio...] and had unintrusive windows that could be made floating, or docked/minimzed to the bottom of the screen. It was incredibly productive.
- Latteland 8y ago
  Just use hangouts in a web browser and pretend like its a desktop client. What doesn't work with that?
bshoemaker 8y ago
Perfect example of the organization (different product teams) dictating the product
blhack 8y ago
Forgive me for being a bit daft, but: What do all of these messenger clients and things bring to the table that didn't already exist on AOL instant messenger 20 years ago? Slack seems like (badly) redone IRC. My computer 20 years ago could run mIRC without issue, and yet my brand new modern macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram chokes on the slack client. WHY? Hangouts seems like (badly) redone AIM. For some unbelievable reason, since about 6 years ago, I can't quite ever figure out how to open or close the "hangouts" application, and google just keeps making it more confusing. It started out pretty sane: either use the mobile site in gmail.com, or open the (beautiful, fast, stable) google talk desktop application. Eventually the desktop application got deprecated, and I HAD to use chrome, but that was essentially okay since it had some nice features. It would dock messages to the bottom of your browser, which was cool. But at some point, google deprecated that, and won't even let you run the old version of it anymore. Now you HAVE to either use gmail.com, or some application that can only seemingly run if chrome (a giant memory hog) is also running. Oh and for some reason the mobile version of the application wants to send SMS messages? But like sometimes it's SMS but sometimes it isn't, an it's not really obvious which is which??!? All of this messaging stuff is seriously driving me crazy. In what world does it make sense that facebook messenger is somehow the easiest, most stable messaging client? WTF? If we could all just agree to start using AIM again, and if they could get file transfers and voice chat working 100%...my god. It would be amazing. And imagine how fast it would run on modern hardware!
- elcomet 8y ago
  I really don't agree with you For Slack / IRC: Slack is a much easier IRC: you don't need a bouncer to keep your session open, you can easily send files / images / videos, code snippets, a lot of integrations are baked in and work very well. For hangouts / AIM: Can you do video chat on AIM ? Also, for AIM, you still need someone to maintain the server, but I don't think people are ready to pay for chat. And they But why would a company host for free a server for an open protocol like AIM ? Why do you think we don't see more big companies behind it? Also, I think voice chats work very well with facebook messenger (I don't remember that it worked that well in the golden era of AIM and MSN messenger).
mkhpalm 8y ago
Still sounds like waffling to me. Unless they plan on acting now (dropping something tomorrow) I suspect these plans can easily change again. Just as they did through Allo and the last time they tried to differentiate their many competing solutions to the same problem. Meanwhile, many people are not interested in waiting around to find or figure it out. Plenty of clear and concise alternatives.
Latteland 8y ago
Why don't they build one chat system that all of these features work with. And when they want to try a new feature, put it as an option on the same app. You don't need to make a new chat app all the time! Pick one, give it a video call option, let it do sms, let it chat with people with google account, make it work with business domains hosted by google. Done!
upbeatlinux 8y ago
Would you like fluff with your PR waffle?
Andrex 8y ago
When and why did Google decide that cloud-first messaging was on the outs, and device-tied messaging was the new hotness? Because I thoroughly disagree.
a-dub 8y ago
So the business product is named like a consumer product (Hangouts) and the consumer product is named like a business product (Messages). I suppose that makes sense in today's upside down world.
- shard972 8y ago
  Quiet, otherwise google will resolve this by launching two new messaging apps.
  - markmark 8y ago
    You did it, they heard you, Messages is now Youtube Chat and Hangouts has been replaced by a confused looking goldfish.
Snapfish 8y ago
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koshak 8y ago
Google has clearly got internal problems with their product management. It is a well-known fact that the fewer options you have the easier the choice. Once you have to choose between similar things with intersecting feature sets you find yourself in the center of uncomfortable mess. And there is no one to blame but those who make high level decisions in Google.
gordon_freeman 8y ago
I don't understand why can't just Google copy iMessage exactly as it is. They can just tie up the chat app like Hangouts to the Gmail ID and just build SMS and Video functionality into it. And make it available by default. So when I want to SMS, Text, or Video I don't need to "think" which app to use. They can just get rid of their Messages, Allo, Duo, etc and just stick to one default messaging app.
CivBase 8y ago
So... this? | Text | Video Business | Chat | Meet Personal | Messages | Duo I guess that makes a lot more sense... I just wish I knew why four separate apps are needed in the first place. Why can't text and audio/video be supported in the same app? Skype, Hangouts, HipChat (RIP) and many other messaging programs have been doing it for ages. It's simple and intuitive. The Hangouts Chat/Meet split is particularly confusing. Aside from supporting more people in a call, I really don't understand what makes a Meet call better than the old Hangouts calls. My confusion is only compounded by Google's continued support for calls on the old Hangouts (now "Hangouts Chat"?). Is there really such a big difference between an enterprise chat service and a personal one? Companies were turning to Hangouts long before Google announced it would become an enterprise-focused service. HipChat (RIP) and Slack have obvious enterprise features that would seem out-of-place in a personal chat app... but Hangouts doesn't have any such features. It became popular without them. Why change your development focus all of the sudden? Why not continue marching towards a unified communications app and let the enterprise customers just do their thing? I'm sure, given proper context and information, most of the decisions leading up to this point make sense in isolation. Still, Google really needs to sit down and figure out where they want all these apps to be in 5 years because - though I'm far from the first (or last) to say it - this is a mess.
- based2 8y ago
  'Chat' supports 'Rich Communications Services' (RCS), the protocol that will replace SMS. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8dneie/do_you_believe_that_apple_will_include_rcs_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8dneie/do_you_believ...
scarejunba 8y ago
WhatsApp is better than any of this nonsense. It has all the features and more. Hangouts/GoogleTalk was nice. Don’t know what this profusion of crap is for.
- tubaguy50035 8y ago
  Turn your phone off and send a message to someone from your computer. Oh wait...
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Huh, I’ve done this before. Don’t know why you’re acting like it’s not a thing.
    - tubaguy50035 8y ago
      You can send messages using whatsapp desktop when your phone is off?
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        Oh shi- Dude! You're totally right. I thought you meant figuratively like "turn your computer off and go out". No, yeah. I get it. iMessage definitely does have that edge.
        tubaguy50035 8y ago
        Hangouts + Google Voice integration works just fine as well. Which is why I think most of us in this thread are/were pissed off. It's the only solution for us right now, with no clear way forward.
pasbesoin 8y ago
You do realize, Google, that most of us are simply not listening to you any more, on this topic? Personally, you've burned me too many times, in this domain. I won't be looking at your products, going forward. (My last phone came with a Duo icon pre-installed on the home screen. I felt an active aversion to clicking it; that persisted, and I never have.) P.S. In retrospect, killing XMPP inter-operability was indeed a harbinger of the larger sh-t-show.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  i remember when i told someone to try allo/duo they laughed in my face and said to stick to whatsapp
  - pasbesoin 8y ago
    I'm not advocating for them, either. But, you make a good point. Here, I'm saying I'm off the Google IM merry-go-round. I'm not turning to the Facebook family for a replacement. I've been backing away from them, as well; it was friends who dragged me into their products (Whatsapp, as well as FB proper and Instagram), in the first place. Between the two, I trust Google more -- with limitations. I might be ok using their IM products to communicate with friends I can't convince to switch to something private, for lower risk communications. But... Google's made a complete sh-t-show out of their IM offers. So, this is a Google customer -- or, "product" -- saying to them that one more launch won't make any difference. Users have been looking for one launch, then stop and just work on that. You are looking at the wrong end of the stick. The people repeatedly launching: They're your problem. (Beta and all is fine: I kind of miss the days when it was genuinely so. This is something else, and it sucks.)
SomewhatLikely 8y ago
I clicked through to the Messages Play store page on my one year old Samsung tablet and it says the app isn't compatible with my device. A replacement for Hangouts this is not.
drEv0 8y ago
Do any of their offerings provide end to end encryption by default?
xte 8y ago
While I'm NOT using anymore Google services I have few sparse world about Google communication services: - GMail (webui and apps), Hangout (webui&app), Drive, ... skyrocketing their weight in Mb and cpu cycles without addin really anything new in the last few years. Only if we read "changelogs" on Play store there is nearly anytime "bugfix and improvements" so nothing that can justify such size change. Only data mining probably changed. - What all users I talk about and me want from a communication service is communication and convergence, so decision to separate SMS from hangout, to have a separate app on Android for Hangout calls etc are simply anti-users features I do not know why are created. - Allo/Duo seems more an experiment to test their users stupidity/reaction, mine was deinstall them the same day I install few days after first availability announcement. - I know Google is changed recently with the disastrous new direction, but I remark that Google in the past was NOT a philanthropic geek project and it have made big money on users data as it make today, only real change I see is that in the past such "data spill" was recompensed by good and effective services, now services or disappear or remain the same and became pachydermic. Long story short: dear Alphabet, you are NOT our "alphabet" nor something we can't live without. Personally I discover many new and nice things leaving your services apart. So I think in the near future you will start to loose users and begin suffer "IBM syndrome"/"bureaucratic syndrome" to the last level, seeing your size you probably do not die quickly but certainly you start to loose profit. Super short version: stupidity has increased super-rapidly but not so rapidly, not at a live someone want.
cschep 8y ago
this feels very early 2000’s microsoft. not a good look.
fabiandesimone 8y ago
If anyone is looking for a video conferencing alternative to Hangouts, I can't recommend enough http://gotalk.to http://gotalk.to I have no affiliation and only came to know about them a couple weeks back from a recommendation from someone here. Is phenomenal. It changed the way I work remote.
gehel 8y ago
- @
gvand 8y ago
Fast forward I/O 2019: Google launches a new (or two) chat platform!
hackerbabz 8y ago
Now that messages has a web version, I just don't care about anything else. That's all I wanted. Send texts from my computer or my phone.
tempestn 8y ago
This article is a good summary of all the past and current attempts Google has made at messaging, for those like me who can't keep up. Outside of maybe Google employees, is there anyone who can at this point? https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messaging-apps-867843/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messaging-apps-86784... It really just cements the impression that there's absolutely no consistent leadership vision over there.
bad_user 8y ago
GChat was great because it wasn't locking users into Google's ecosystem. People from other platforms could chat with you directly because it supported federation. With Hangouts they dropped XMPP because supposedly it was preventing them to innovate and because Microsoft and Facebook weren't playing as nice. GChat was actually successful and I enjoyed it for a long time. I couldn't be happier that all of their other attempts are failing. The problem with Google is that they've lost what made them special back in the day. What made them great was openness. They were building on top of standards. And nobody complained that their web properties are optimized for their own browser. Nowadays they just want to lock people into their walled garden. Guess that's what happens when you're no longer the underdog.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
> Thanks to partnerships with over 40 carriers and device makers, over 175 million of you are now using Messages, our messaging app for Android phones, every month. It's amazing how low this is for their market share, compared to iMessage which so seamlessly integrated SMS and more-than-SMS years ago. Given that Google do dictate preinstalled apps on Android it's not obvious why they've never managed to clone the iMessage experience.
tjoff 8y ago
Is this a joke? That whole blog post reads like satire. Communicating with the people in our lives is one of the most important things we do every day, whether it’s chatting with friends about an upcoming trip, calling mom to check in, or touching base with colleagues. So when I'm forced to move off hangouts for those connections that I still user over it - what do you think the chances are that I will choose a google product?
tanilama 8y ago
Google had lost. Nobody cares or dares use their messaging app any more. Deal is done.
acd10j 8y ago
Quick quiz ? Could someone please let me know what is the new brand name of chat that loads with Gmail Web ?
fiatjaf 8y ago
Google should stop trying to compete in big existing markets and should focus on creating new things.
justtopost 8y ago
Whoever at google greenlighted this should have to read this entire thread out loud. Twice.
puma1 8y ago
dumpster fire.
jdofaz 8y ago
Hangouts once upon a time was an effective iMessage alternative and Google totally squandered what they had. Several years back the Android version of hangouts: * could message over hangouts, google voice and sms/mms * could merge those methods into a thread by person * was a required vendor pre-install app, if you knew someone’s gmail address and they had android you could reliably send a hangouts message * it was easy to video call people because most people had hangouts installed Sure it wasn’t as user friendly as iMessage and FaceTime but the base was there and the ui could have improved to get there.
kentt 8y ago
"We’ve seen great adoption with both among our G Suite customers." That's nice. For people I've talked to it would be more accurate to say: we forced users off their old working solution onto this and they didn't quit yet.
sharno 8y ago
I bet this is a normal A/B test from google and they'd shut one or 2 of these in a couple of years

283 points by fastest963 8y ago

Well, now everyone know Google sucks in privacy 'cause doing business on users data. I'm not wonder why their ALL messengers failed.

mikehines 8y ago

Resurrect wave and rule them all

jaimex2 8y ago
I love how they are desperately trying to capture the Slack market now... when they had a product that was perfect for it long before Slack.
herewulf 8y ago
The best part about Wave was that it was/is federated, so your data isn't completely siloed like basically every other modern app mentioned in this thread. It's more like e-mail. With sufficient resourcing, it could have revolutionized communication.
- chii 8y ago
  I heard over the grape vine that wave was killed in political maneuvers of management (as they deliberately did not build integrations into email for wave, thus causing adoption issues). The tech is incredibly good! It had so much potential, and yet...

dbcooper 8y ago

Just a conplete mess.

jaimex2 8y ago
Its turned into a massive joke. They can create amazing machine learning and AI systems, can't put together a consistent chat app - stuff thats been around since the beginning of the Internet.
- fencepost 8y ago
  I think that joke must include a dozen highly skilled but poorly socialized engineers in a conference room completely failing to communicate about communicating. I'm just not sure if it's a comedy, a satire or a tragedy.

senectus1 8y ago

The sooner they replace hangouts with something that is fast and more reliable the better. getting tired of the inconsistencies experienced with hangouts.

navait 8y ago
Google Meet is the new thing.

nyrulez 8y ago

It has to hurt somewhere inside Google to kill Allo but not Duo. I honestly expected the opposite given the original push behind these apps. The problem with all these messaging experiences is that none of them work well on both dekstop and mobile. They seem to be optimized one way or the other. If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.

saagarjha 8y ago
Does Google have another video calling solution similar to Duo to replace it with?
- dorfsmay 8y ago
  Hangouts?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - Gustomaximus 8y ago
    Hangout was good but it feels like Google whiteanted this product in the hope people would head to Allo/Duo. While in reality they just pushed people away completely. I find it amazing how these decisions are made... it seems like most people here could see the train wreck coming from this at the beginning. Are the descion makers that bad? Did no-one have the guts to discuss how bad these things looked or were they arrogant enought to feel they can fly above market sentiment... I always find it interesting how bad decisions are made in such seemingly obvious circumstances.

tehlike 8y ago

The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words. Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop. Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.

killjoywashere 8y ago
> blog post is very confusing at best Yeah, there's clarity at the end, but there could have been a cartoon in 4 frames: Frame 1: icons of Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Messaging Frame 2: Hangouts splits into Meet and Chat (5 things) Frame 3: Duo, Messaging, Meet annd Chat arranged in a 2x2 grid of (messaging, phone/video) x (consumer, business), with Allo still hanging above Frame 4: Allo getting squeezed into Messaging.
- npunt 8y ago
  You're onto something. This should be a chart though, and encompass the whole scope of Google's attempts at messaging over the years. Plot out all the bundling (Hangouts & G+) and unbundling (Allo's features -> Messages) like xkcd's movie narrative charts: https://xkcd.com/657/ https://xkcd.com/657/ At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.
  - maccam94 8y ago
    Don't forget Talk and Voice
  - csours 8y ago
    https://robots.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march https://robots.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualizatio... Based on one of the most famous visualizations of all times - Napoleon's 1812 invasion of russia

pspeter3 8y ago

I really want to know what is the plan for Project Fi. The Hangouts integration is one of the best aspects of the service

amyjess 8y ago
This. If Fi integration with Hangouts goes away without a replacement, I'm cancelling my Fi service and switching to Pinger Textfree Web for text messaging.

joekrill 8y ago

I saw the title and thought: "Finally, they're going to admit to what a mess they've created and propose a way forward". But nope, just a PR fluff post.

dorfsmay 8y ago

The last time I used messages it made a point not to let me chose if I wanted to use SMS vs google own protocol, and I felt I was a weapon for google to bring more users to their ecosystem. The last time I used hello and duo they needed either a phone or a smartphone or both. For me a messaging system should not require to have a phone number and should equally well across a range of devices including Linux desktop. Hangouts and zoom can do it, why would other apps not do it?

jdofaz 8y ago
Android Messages is just an SMS/MMS/RCS app, it doesn’t have a google account, it uses your cellular carrier.

robbiemitchell 8y ago

1. What is the difference between Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet? Why are they separate products? 2. What is the difference between Duo and Hangouts?

codyogden 8y ago
I can answer #1: Hangouts Chat is a standalone, text chat-only app (chat.google.com), similar in functionality to Slack. It will/does have the ability for third-party developers to create bots, etc. Hangouts Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" type of communications. Both of these (according to this blog) will only be available to G Suite (enterprise) users. Why they are separate products? Who knows.
- sidjor 8y ago
  They are both available to G Suite - Basic users from start.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  > Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" Yeah, no. Meet is the most equal-among-all video conferencing app I've ever seen. It's ability to promote the speaker to the main window is uncannily good. It is my go-to, and I use it intercontinental and inter-org.
tensor 8y ago
1. Hangouts Chat is a text chat app more like slack then anything. Meet is video conferencing like Zoom or Webex. 2. Duo is a video calling app like Facetime or Skype.

bonsai80 8y ago

I may need to read that mess several more times to understand what they're doing, but from what I gather if I just want to do video chat with family with Google stuff, I'll need to use their "Duo" app. Does anyone use that and know if it also works in a browser (preferably Firefox)?

shubidubi 8y ago

How about having only one app where i can simply use messaging and video? why do i need to install 4 different apps for it?

ndnxhs 8y ago
Because they gave 4 different people a promotion
- shubidubi 8y ago
  give another promotion to the person who will combine all of them.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    pending ...
  - sondh 8y ago
    The problem is right here, it's just gonna end up with 5 different apps. Related xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- stupidbird 8y ago
  Sew them all together and make a Google Messenger centipede.
- blaisio 8y ago
  That's probably exactly what happened.
petecox 8y ago
Why not open the protocol, so I can use the one app for all my cross-service messaging needs? e.g. Pidgin.
- pferde 8y ago
  Where's the money in that?

microdrum 8y ago

What a joke of a blog post, and what a joke of a company. This isn’t “the latest.” It’s the latest deprecation, and the latest breach of implied warranty to the consumer.

devereaux 8y ago

When google voice was introduced, I ported my phone number. It was nice to use the service. Before that, I had a grandstream ATA. The service was great. Now, everyday feels worse. Last month, I was traveling abroad and had more important things to do than to confirm the cellular number linked to voice was still mine. So google decided not just to stop redirecting phonecalls, but also to stop me from calling using the dialer app. Basically, my "phone privileges" was unilaterally revoked by google because I did not obey the phone number verification procedure. I have previously checked companies like callcentric, but it is now one of my priority. I can't entrust google with my phone service in 2019.

jdofaz 8y ago
Callcentric can do sms now if you need that
- devereaux 8y ago
  Interesting, even if they don't have an SMS API yet. I will have to check again their offer, and see if their native client improved. At the moment I mostly use them for fax and SIP trunking. Even if twilio is good, I'd rather now have everything in one place.

olegious 8y ago

So basically - "If you need to do video calling, use Duo. If you need to send messages Android to Android use Android Messaging. If you need a cross platform messaging service outside of enterprise use Hango...ooops"

Mistri 8y ago

I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling? For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.

davidbanham 8y ago
https://appear.in/ https://appear.in/
- Mistri 8y ago
  While it's not bad, it has many features that are paid-only and the UI isn't perfect... but I suppose I was spoiled by Hangouts. Thanks for the tip.
  - davidbanham 8y ago
    The main reason I still use Google Meet is that appear.in has a full-fat P2P model where your video and audio must stream to every user and vice versa. Even with 4 people that can get pretty taxing on a poor connection. Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.
- bonsai80 8y ago
  I've liked using that in the past. They seem to require a login now.
  - dorianm 8y ago
    Oh no! Used to be my favorite
  - davidbanham 8y ago

fencepost 8y ago

Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.

woogiewonka 8y ago
Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations. Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like. I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.
- fencepost 8y ago
  Could be worse. They could have named it "Chill"
  - mikelward 8y ago
    Shhh! Don't give them ideas!
hesarenu 8y ago
Its WhatsApp expect for Americans users i suppose.
ahartmetz 8y ago
IRC is the most consistent and stable, just saying ;)

stupidbird 8y ago

How are they still getting this wrong. One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.

Gustomaximus 8y ago
I don't think the problem is even one app. They should have had a central board where people set interoperability standards then they can build multiple apps. As long as hangouts could talk with Allo etc it doesn't matter and people can use the one they prefer and it's irelevant to another person's descion. Now Google have dug a deeper hole as there is little change any tech influencer is going to use or promote Google messaging apps to their circle. Personally I'm available on Signal, Skype and WhatsApp and it's going to take a hell of a change to make me care about trying something else.
woogiewonka 8y ago
It's like nobody at Google uses an iPhone or has heard of Facetime. "Oh look, there's an app that lets you call and at a tap of a button turns that call into video! I wonder if we should do something similar?" "- nah, that would be too easy."
- Latteland 8y ago
  I've had that for 10 years with google. I don't understand. I look at a contact while in gmail, click on it to go to hangouts and click the video call button.
ulfw 8y ago
It's so many things Google can't decide what they want. Almost all their Google services are login-based. Your gmail login works on search, on youtube, on calendar, on anything really. Yes. On Hangouts too. But not Allo/Duo. Someone thought it would be hipper to throw that out the window and have people use their phone number instead. Cool. Sure. But why make that the only choice for almost a year?
awill 8y ago
It really is that simple. It's really shocking that a company like Google has failed over and over at this. Apple nailed it on the first try. Both iMessage and FaceTime. What's more frustrating is that Google had Google Talk. It was super successful and really well liked. Rather than maintain and improve it, they threw it away.

jvagner 8y ago

which one will be built into gmail in the future? one of the greatest advantages google has is gmail/hangouts native integration in the browser. if they lose that, i think a good bit of what makes gmail attractive goes with it. i say this as an iOS user.

justinplouffe 8y ago

If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.

sorenjan 8y ago
Yes and no. You can use their Messages web client, but it's still going to be SMS to and from your phone. It's a contrived and pretty ugly solution IMO. https://messages.android.com/ https://messages.android.com/
- briandear 8y ago
  Good grief. It seems like they are doing everything possible to not make something as good as Apple Messages. Data chat without a phone number, interoperability with conventional SMS and the ability to start an instant FaceTime. And with Group FaceTime, it’s even more compelling. You can even do audio only or start a real phone call or send a video or audio message, all in one place. Other than org politics, I can’t understand why Google messaging services are a convoluted mess. I need a flowchart just to understand it all.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

dkhenry 8y ago

What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete them.

Eridrus 8y ago
Signal and Allo actually have a similar number of installs, they're both in the 10-50m installs bucket in the Play store. I use Signal, but it's fine at best, but it's not really going to break out of it's niche.
- briandear 8y ago
  That doesn’t count all of the iOS people that also use Signal. I use Signal and Apple Messages and didn’t even know Allo existed. I have a perhaps irrational fear of using messaging from Google or Facebook because they have lost my trust. Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    Why do people ever switch chat apps? Besides shutdowns, it's because the new app does something the old one doesn't. Signal's pitch was easy encrypted messaging, but now there are apps that fill that slot, even Facebook Messenger has e2e encrypted chat, so there's not a lot of reason for Google to invest there. Google Duo has succeeded as an app known for making video calls, which is as much a marketing/positioning achievement as it is a technical one. There are lots of people declaring they will use a Google product in this thread, but of course no one is going to use a nonexistent product that people imagine as a clone of what already exists. Unless Google finds an "in", they're not going to get anywhere, even with whatever perfect app HN imagines.
  - wpietri 8y ago

sorenjan 8y ago

I'm pretty sure this blog post was forced due to the recent articles about Hangouts and Allo on 9to5google.com [0], [1]. Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution. If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now. [0] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d... [1] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/

ehsankia 8y ago
> Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person Isn't that recursive thinking? No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers. > I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol I'm curious, but could RCS be interchangeably used both through provider and through a host such as Google? Could Google not host their own RCS backend?
- grahn 8y ago
  > No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers. You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.

DevKoala 8y ago

Google is discountinuing Allo next year. I have never been affected by one of these decisions by Google since I try to stay away from their ecosystem, but I am confident this is a way to lose user trust.

reasonablemann 8y ago

Lots of money. Lots of ideas. No focus.

niftich 8y ago

I should take my timeline of Google's chat fumbles [1] and keep it updated. A lot has happened since. But Allo's stagnation has been known since April 2018 [2], and "classic" Hangouts' decline has long been suspected in light of the new services also prefixed by the same name. This post seemed like it might cut the BS and explain what's going on, but it's tinged with PR platitudes and is unacceptably unclear and nonchalant about "classic" Hangouts' fate. They're basically saying they'll shut it down soon but not quite yet. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16886921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16886921

ericabiz 8y ago

I count six different apps here: Allo Duo Messages Hangouts Hangouts Chat Hangouts Meet I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up? This is ridiculous.

sdinsn 8y ago
Chat & Meet are for businesses, and Allo is ending. So the vast majority need to only keep up with 3.
- ericabiz 8y ago
  There’s a Googler in here who wrote a comment on this post: “I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.” I just don’t know. I’m at a complete loss for words on how Google can screw this up so badly. We actually use Hangouts every day for our business. I have been advocating a move to Slack.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    We found we got a nice boost in call quality when we moved to from hangouts to slack. zoom.us is also good.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Don't forget the native Android SMS app.
- fastest963 8y ago
  That's Messages
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    No, "Messages" is the successor to the now discontinued "Messaging" app. They would coexist when "Messages" had to be downloaded from the Play store.

brendanmc6 8y ago

I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal. In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be. I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized. And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to. And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work. And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number... On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare. I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said. What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece) EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp https://discord.gg/CmdgUp

mrkstu 8y ago
This is the brilliance of iMessage where it gets critical mass- fallback to SMS but pushing the iMessage identity tied to an account that follows you to new phones/devices. I think that iMessage network effect is a big reason for the steady market share growth of iPhone in the US- none of the competitive apps have cross-generational appeal, just iMessage.

sorenjan 8y ago

Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gaming circles. Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.

pavanagrawal123 8y ago
I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.
- kibwen 8y ago
  Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.
  - pavanagrawal123 8y ago
    Try https://preview.web.skype.com/ https://preview.web.skype.com/ It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)
    - pmlnr 8y ago
      > Browser not supported > Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience. > Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer. That is on up to date Firefox on Debian unstable. Bravo.

m0dest 8y ago

It's great that they've simplified their story. Totally makes sense now. Texting app and AV app for consumers, texting app and AV app for teams. But this leaves a giant hole in their consumer texting product. Have they given up on making a private, cross-platform texting product for consumers? Messages seems like it must use an Android phone as the user's primary device – as SMS requires OS integration and presumably RCS does too. And neither SMS or RCS are private. Carriers have full visibility to all messages. That's light-years less secure than the end-to-end encryption offered by iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, and even less private than the former Hangouts. (Say what you will about Google, I'd trust them with my private messages far more than any pair of cellular carriers.)

hossbeast 8y ago

From any of these 6 Google apps, I should be able to message/voice as appropriate, to users on any of the other apps. Protocol over apps. It's the only way forward.

zodvik 8y ago

Hangouts Chat is such a botched launch. It is backwards compatible with single user chat and not group chats. It effectively ensures that people cannot completely migrate to it. The overhead of keeping 2 apps and getting the same notification twice was too much - ended up going back to classic Hangouts.

technofiend 8y ago

One of the absolute top features of Hangouts is indexing chats into your Gmail search results. And yet here goes Google yet again applying the foot gun to a useful feature. Do they buy bullets in bulk or something?

shaklee3 8y ago
Which, oddly enough, cannot be search on mobile.

yodon 8y ago

Genuine question here, as I've read both the post and all the comments here and I still can't figure this out: Does this blog post say google's consumer text messaging strategy is now "send an email?" I read the post as saying Messages is for Android consumer text messaging, Duo for cross-platform consumer video, and Hangouts for enterprise text and video. That doesn't seem to leave anything for friends doing text chat outside of Android.

procinct 8y ago
I think it's more "send an sms". I could be reading this post wrong though.
- yodon 8y ago
  > "send an sms" I guess that's better than telling people to fax 8 track tapes, but not by much

sam0x17 8y ago

I use hangouts as my primary communication app with my spouse on desktop and android, and have since the google talk days. Will this no longer after the change and if not what is the replacement?

ronreiter 8y ago

Oh my god - Google really has the worst product management etiquette in the world. It’s not hard. Look around you for what works and what doesn’t and copy that. The post is also confusing and hard to get the bottom line out of it. Just write “we are killing Allo”.

markmark 8y ago
Literally just copy imessage feature for feature, or are they too beholden to carriers to do that?

jknz 8y ago

FAQ: how start a video call using Google products? Answer: Go to Gmail and send an email to the other party "can you Skype now?". Literally. I had to schedule a video call recently by email. There is simply no formulation to schedule a video call using the name of one of google's products. "Can you Hangout tomorrow?", "Can you Duo tomorrow", "Can you chat with Allo tomorrow?". Nothing would work without confusing the other party with some probability. "Can you Skype tomorrow" always works, with everyone, no confusion.

ndespres 8y ago
To which many would reply, "Yes, I can Skype with you. I am at work, so I'll be using my Skype for Business program which recently replaced Lync. My Skype will talk to yours, right? Oh it says here that Skype for Business (which used to be Lync (which used to be Office Communicator)), is now Teams, so uhh can you just call me on my phone instead. Thanks
- beart 8y ago
  Skype for Business and Teams are not the same app. That said, I've found Teams very lacking in exactly the way Skype is not, and Skype lacking in exactly the way Teams is not which is very frustrating.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    SfB is deprecated, and Teams is designated its replacement.
hkmurakami 8y ago
Creating a google calendar event with an embedded link to a hangouts room works pretty well in my experience.
- pookeh 8y ago
  Second this. Clicking on the add hangouts link is dead simple and does exactly what the OP wants

bubblethink 8y ago

I think the main reason people use hangouts at all is because everyone has gmail open all the time, or at least everyone has a gmail account. It's just laziness for the most part. Not that chat is that hard a problem or that hangouts is so good. If you have to go to newshinymessenger.google.com at any point, the advantage will die.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

runn1ng 8y ago

"yeah we realize our messenger offer is confusing, but we are too big of a mess internally so we will keep it confusing. sorry!"

HHalvi 8y ago

My takeaway from this post was google saying : We acknowledge that Hangouts, Duo, Allo exist and we think they were orphaned for too long and we are adopting them back. Hangouts to me is like Flash, useful but so out of touch with everyday needs of an ever evolving world and sadly forgotten. I love Google Photos, Duo as well as Messenger (SMS App) and i hope they don't end up in Google's Graveyard sometime soon.

uuill 8y ago

I use Hangouts as a desktop messaging client to communicate with my Mom. She has a Chromebook, but no Android phone. I also use Hangouts (from my desktop) to communicate with friends via an ongoing chat stream (with the occasional video chat). My use case seems to be falling through the cracks with Google's new approach. I guess I will be signing my Mom up with a Google Voice number and switching to Skype for for my video chats.

warent 8y ago

I wonder if what they're doing is trying to refine each individual aspect of communication as much as possible in various apps so that later they can merge them all into one massive super-app. So, email, texting, messaging, video chat, voice, all merged into "Google Human" or something crazy.

V-eHGsd_ 8y ago

as a xoogler, I wish they would've titled this, "an update on allo".

millstone 8y ago

I've been in many come-to-Jesus meetings wherein Leadership acknowledges their strategic failures, then busts out a presentation detailing the New Strategy, consisting of mild tweaks of the Existing Strategy. Mild tweaks are great because they spare Leadership the pain of making hard decisions. > And by refocusing on Messages and Duo for consumers and Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team collaboration "Instead of working on five products, we're 'refocusing' down to four products." Right. This has the stench of a post-faction justification that expertly avoids stepping on too many toes. IME Leadership gets axed by Senior Leadership not too long after.

joenathanone 8y ago
They also fail to address Google Voice, their VOIP/SMS-OIP app. Here's to hoping they don't cancel it down the line too.

ulfw 8y ago

It's beyond ridiculous to say 'we failed to gain traction with a free solution that anybody can install on any Android and iPhone and use it TODAY' and replace that with 'but we will succeed in gaining traction with a solution that only runs on a few select phones and need carrier support and where you never know if the person you are trying to message has a compatible device on a compatible carrier". In what world do Google product people live these days?

jordanthoms 8y ago

This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.

Groxx 8y ago
I'm also one of those that was / is still sad about losing XMPP integration. Highly customizable alerts are borderline essential if you have a lot of threads going, but hangouts seems determined to prevent you from doing any of that.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Makes sense, unfortunately commercial products universally abandon those open protocols at some point.
smt88 8y ago
Want to know an even more stupid rebrand? A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it. The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough. Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.

rmykhajliw 8y ago

I was a user of hangouts for the last 10 years already since a closed for public alpha-beta. It was wonderful product for companies, for teams. It was so easy to create a meeting (because it had an integration with google calendar) invite everyone, add some people phone number to join the same conversation. It just worked and it was the best on the market. Then Google decided to kill this product one by one removing useful features like: conference call, external plugins, jabber support (jabber allowed to easily integrate with other corporate stuff). Finally Hangouts transformed from a must-have-thing into another-chat-app-none-use. I waited a long time, but there's still NO DESKTOP client. I suppose Google believe in mobile first world etc. but REALITY says 99% of corporate work's done DESKTOP. And web based-chat is not a solution at all. Before I can use alternative clients like psy, it wasn't really convenient but it worked well, until it was killed. Death of Hangouts was predictable due to lack attention to the detail and building a wall of ignorance of their users. By the way mobile version hangouts may built on electron because it's the SLOWEST application on my iPhone.

krackers 8y ago
What's really annoying is that they killed off the one thing that was closest to a desktop client [the one seen here: https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extension/raw/master/screenshots/chrome.png https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extensio...] and had unintrusive windows that could be made floating, or docked/minimzed to the bottom of the screen. It was incredibly productive.
Latteland 8y ago
Just use hangouts in a web browser and pretend like its a desktop client. What doesn't work with that?

bshoemaker 8y ago

Perfect example of the organization (different product teams) dictating the product

blhack 8y ago

Forgive me for being a bit daft, but: What do all of these messenger clients and things bring to the table that didn't already exist on AOL instant messenger 20 years ago? Slack seems like (badly) redone IRC. My computer 20 years ago could run mIRC without issue, and yet my brand new modern macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram chokes on the slack client. WHY? Hangouts seems like (badly) redone AIM. For some unbelievable reason, since about 6 years ago, I can't quite ever figure out how to open or close the "hangouts" application, and google just keeps making it more confusing. It started out pretty sane: either use the mobile site in gmail.com, or open the (beautiful, fast, stable) google talk desktop application. Eventually the desktop application got deprecated, and I HAD to use chrome, but that was essentially okay since it had some nice features. It would dock messages to the bottom of your browser, which was cool. But at some point, google deprecated that, and won't even let you run the old version of it anymore. Now you HAVE to either use gmail.com, or some application that can only seemingly run if chrome (a giant memory hog) is also running. Oh and for some reason the mobile version of the application wants to send SMS messages? But like sometimes it's SMS but sometimes it isn't, an it's not really obvious which is which??!? All of this messaging stuff is seriously driving me crazy. In what world does it make sense that facebook messenger is somehow the easiest, most stable messaging client? WTF? If we could all just agree to start using AIM again, and if they could get file transfers and voice chat working 100%...my god. It would be amazing. And imagine how fast it would run on modern hardware!

elcomet 8y ago
I really don't agree with you For Slack / IRC: Slack is a much easier IRC: you don't need a bouncer to keep your session open, you can easily send files / images / videos, code snippets, a lot of integrations are baked in and work very well. For hangouts / AIM: Can you do video chat on AIM ? Also, for AIM, you still need someone to maintain the server, but I don't think people are ready to pay for chat. And they But why would a company host for free a server for an open protocol like AIM ? Why do you think we don't see more big companies behind it? Also, I think voice chats work very well with facebook messenger (I don't remember that it worked that well in the golden era of AIM and MSN messenger).

mkhpalm 8y ago

Still sounds like waffling to me. Unless they plan on acting now (dropping something tomorrow) I suspect these plans can easily change again. Just as they did through Allo and the last time they tried to differentiate their many competing solutions to the same problem. Meanwhile, many people are not interested in waiting around to find or figure it out. Plenty of clear and concise alternatives.

Latteland 8y ago

Why don't they build one chat system that all of these features work with. And when they want to try a new feature, put it as an option on the same app. You don't need to make a new chat app all the time! Pick one, give it a video call option, let it do sms, let it chat with people with google account, make it work with business domains hosted by google. Done!

upbeatlinux 8y ago

Would you like fluff with your PR waffle?

Andrex 8y ago

When and why did Google decide that cloud-first messaging was on the outs, and device-tied messaging was the new hotness? Because I thoroughly disagree.

a-dub 8y ago

So the business product is named like a consumer product (Hangouts) and the consumer product is named like a business product (Messages). I suppose that makes sense in today's upside down world.

shard972 8y ago
Quiet, otherwise google will resolve this by launching two new messaging apps.
- markmark 8y ago
  You did it, they heard you, Messages is now Youtube Chat and Hangouts has been replaced by a confused looking goldfish.

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koshak 8y ago

Google has clearly got internal problems with their product management. It is a well-known fact that the fewer options you have the easier the choice. Once you have to choose between similar things with intersecting feature sets you find yourself in the center of uncomfortable mess. And there is no one to blame but those who make high level decisions in Google.

gordon_freeman 8y ago

I don't understand why can't just Google copy iMessage exactly as it is. They can just tie up the chat app like Hangouts to the Gmail ID and just build SMS and Video functionality into it. And make it available by default. So when I want to SMS, Text, or Video I don't need to "think" which app to use. They can just get rid of their Messages, Allo, Duo, etc and just stick to one default messaging app.

CivBase 8y ago

So... this? | Text | Video Business | Chat | Meet Personal | Messages | Duo I guess that makes a lot more sense... I just wish I knew why four separate apps are needed in the first place. Why can't text and audio/video be supported in the same app? Skype, Hangouts, HipChat (RIP) and many other messaging programs have been doing it for ages. It's simple and intuitive. The Hangouts Chat/Meet split is particularly confusing. Aside from supporting more people in a call, I really don't understand what makes a Meet call better than the old Hangouts calls. My confusion is only compounded by Google's continued support for calls on the old Hangouts (now "Hangouts Chat"?). Is there really such a big difference between an enterprise chat service and a personal one? Companies were turning to Hangouts long before Google announced it would become an enterprise-focused service. HipChat (RIP) and Slack have obvious enterprise features that would seem out-of-place in a personal chat app... but Hangouts doesn't have any such features. It became popular without them. Why change your development focus all of the sudden? Why not continue marching towards a unified communications app and let the enterprise customers just do their thing? I'm sure, given proper context and information, most of the decisions leading up to this point make sense in isolation. Still, Google really needs to sit down and figure out where they want all these apps to be in 5 years because - though I'm far from the first (or last) to say it - this is a mess.

based2 8y ago
'Chat' supports 'Rich Communications Services' (RCS), the protocol that will replace SMS. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8dneie/do_you_believe_that_apple_will_include_rcs_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8dneie/do_you_believ...

scarejunba 8y ago

WhatsApp is better than any of this nonsense. It has all the features and more. Hangouts/GoogleTalk was nice. Don’t know what this profusion of crap is for.

tubaguy50035 8y ago
Turn your phone off and send a message to someone from your computer. Oh wait...
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Huh, I’ve done this before. Don’t know why you’re acting like it’s not a thing.
  - tubaguy50035 8y ago
    You can send messages using whatsapp desktop when your phone is off?
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Oh shi- Dude! You're totally right. I thought you meant figuratively like "turn your computer off and go out". No, yeah. I get it. iMessage definitely does have that edge.
      - tubaguy50035 8y ago
        Hangouts + Google Voice integration works just fine as well. Which is why I think most of us in this thread are/were pissed off. It's the only solution for us right now, with no clear way forward.

pasbesoin 8y ago

You do realize, Google, that most of us are simply not listening to you any more, on this topic? Personally, you've burned me too many times, in this domain. I won't be looking at your products, going forward. (My last phone came with a Duo icon pre-installed on the home screen. I felt an active aversion to clicking it; that persisted, and I never have.) P.S. In retrospect, killing XMPP inter-operability was indeed a harbinger of the larger sh-t-show.

kkarakk 8y ago
i remember when i told someone to try allo/duo they laughed in my face and said to stick to whatsapp
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  I'm not advocating for them, either. But, you make a good point. Here, I'm saying I'm off the Google IM merry-go-round. I'm not turning to the Facebook family for a replacement. I've been backing away from them, as well; it was friends who dragged me into their products (Whatsapp, as well as FB proper and Instagram), in the first place. Between the two, I trust Google more -- with limitations. I might be ok using their IM products to communicate with friends I can't convince to switch to something private, for lower risk communications. But... Google's made a complete sh-t-show out of their IM offers. So, this is a Google customer -- or, "product" -- saying to them that one more launch won't make any difference. Users have been looking for one launch, then stop and just work on that. You are looking at the wrong end of the stick. The people repeatedly launching: They're your problem. (Beta and all is fine: I kind of miss the days when it was genuinely so. This is something else, and it sucks.)

SomewhatLikely 8y ago

I clicked through to the Messages Play store page on my one year old Samsung tablet and it says the app isn't compatible with my device. A replacement for Hangouts this is not.

drEv0 8y ago

Do any of their offerings provide end to end encryption by default?

xte 8y ago

While I'm NOT using anymore Google services I have few sparse world about Google communication services: - GMail (webui and apps), Hangout (webui&app), Drive, ... skyrocketing their weight in Mb and cpu cycles without addin really anything new in the last few years. Only if we read "changelogs" on Play store there is nearly anytime "bugfix and improvements" so nothing that can justify such size change. Only data mining probably changed. - What all users I talk about and me want from a communication service is communication and convergence, so decision to separate SMS from hangout, to have a separate app on Android for Hangout calls etc are simply anti-users features I do not know why are created. - Allo/Duo seems more an experiment to test their users stupidity/reaction, mine was deinstall them the same day I install few days after first availability announcement. - I know Google is changed recently with the disastrous new direction, but I remark that Google in the past was NOT a philanthropic geek project and it have made big money on users data as it make today, only real change I see is that in the past such "data spill" was recompensed by good and effective services, now services or disappear or remain the same and became pachydermic. Long story short: dear Alphabet, you are NOT our "alphabet" nor something we can't live without. Personally I discover many new and nice things leaving your services apart. So I think in the near future you will start to loose users and begin suffer "IBM syndrome"/"bureaucratic syndrome" to the last level, seeing your size you probably do not die quickly but certainly you start to loose profit. Super short version: stupidity has increased super-rapidly but not so rapidly, not at a live someone want.

cschep 8y ago

this feels very early 2000’s microsoft. not a good look.

fabiandesimone 8y ago

If anyone is looking for a video conferencing alternative to Hangouts, I can't recommend enough http://gotalk.to http://gotalk.to I have no affiliation and only came to know about them a couple weeks back from a recommendation from someone here. Is phenomenal. It changed the way I work remote.

gehel 8y ago

- @

gvand 8y ago

Fast forward I/O 2019: Google launches a new (or two) chat platform!

hackerbabz 8y ago

Now that messages has a web version, I just don't care about anything else. That's all I wanted. Send texts from my computer or my phone.

tempestn 8y ago

This article is a good summary of all the past and current attempts Google has made at messaging, for those like me who can't keep up. Outside of maybe Google employees, is there anyone who can at this point? https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messaging-apps-867843/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messaging-apps-86784... It really just cements the impression that there's absolutely no consistent leadership vision over there.

bad_user 8y ago

GChat was great because it wasn't locking users into Google's ecosystem. People from other platforms could chat with you directly because it supported federation. With Hangouts they dropped XMPP because supposedly it was preventing them to innovate and because Microsoft and Facebook weren't playing as nice. GChat was actually successful and I enjoyed it for a long time. I couldn't be happier that all of their other attempts are failing. The problem with Google is that they've lost what made them special back in the day. What made them great was openness. They were building on top of standards. And nobody complained that their web properties are optimized for their own browser. Nowadays they just want to lock people into their walled garden. Guess that's what happens when you're no longer the underdog.

mcintyre1994 8y ago

> Thanks to partnerships with over 40 carriers and device makers, over 175 million of you are now using Messages, our messaging app for Android phones, every month. It's amazing how low this is for their market share, compared to iMessage which so seamlessly integrated SMS and more-than-SMS years ago. Given that Google do dictate preinstalled apps on Android it's not obvious why they've never managed to clone the iMessage experience.

tjoff 8y ago

Is this a joke? That whole blog post reads like satire. Communicating with the people in our lives is one of the most important things we do every day, whether it’s chatting with friends about an upcoming trip, calling mom to check in, or touching base with colleagues. So when I'm forced to move off hangouts for those connections that I still user over it - what do you think the chances are that I will choose a google product?

tanilama 8y ago

Google had lost. Nobody cares or dares use their messaging app any more. Deal is done.

acd10j 8y ago

Quick quiz ? Could someone please let me know what is the new brand name of chat that loads with Gmail Web ?

fiatjaf 8y ago

Google should stop trying to compete in big existing markets and should focus on creating new things.

justtopost 8y ago

Whoever at google greenlighted this should have to read this entire thread out loud. Twice.

puma1 8y ago

dumpster fire.

jdofaz 8y ago

Hangouts once upon a time was an effective iMessage alternative and Google totally squandered what they had. Several years back the Android version of hangouts: * could message over hangouts, google voice and sms/mms * could merge those methods into a thread by person * was a required vendor pre-install app, if you knew someone’s gmail address and they had android you could reliably send a hangouts message * it was easy to video call people because most people had hangouts installed Sure it wasn’t as user friendly as iMessage and FaceTime but the base was there and the ui could have improved to get there.

kentt 8y ago

"We’ve seen great adoption with both among our G Suite customers." That's nice. For people I've talked to it would be more accurate to say: we forced users off their old working solution onto this and they didn't quit yet.

sharno 8y ago

I bet this is a normal A/B test from google and they'd shut one or 2 of these in a couple of years