9 ms·

Besides the fact that this is a pretty serious bug, I'm rather underwhelmed by the care Google has been taking of their hangouts product after releasing it last

Besides the fact that this is a pretty serious bug, I'm rather underwhelmed by the care Google has been taking of their hangouts product after releasing it last May. And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' (it's a design decision on their end), but more the general experience of using hangouts. As far as I can tell you're still not able to mute the new message sound, without turning off notifications all together (hangouts in Gmail). Chatter picking up in a hangout and you want to mute it for a while? Again, not possible. Turn off all notifications for that hangout and chances are you'll completely forget you were ever part of that conversation (snoozing notifications hangouts-wide makes sure you miss all other personal messages sent to you as well). Uploading a photo on a slow network is a pretty terrible experience: it'll start telling you the upload has failed and it's retrying (no progress to be seen anywhere). If you delete the message and try again, you'll probably end up with two of the same messages in your conversation, because often it doesn't appear to correctly 'receive' your deletion request either. When you've received a photo that you need to save to your gallery (maybe you want to zoom-in a little, or share it with someone else?), be prepared to hit that save button for a while until you finally get a confirmation that the photo has actually been saved. Stuff like this is not a problem when it's your first release, but 4 months on you'd expect a company like Google to be able to iron out quirks like these. But no, we get extra emoji as one of the few updates to the hangouts platform. [edit: spelling]

liquid_x 13y ago
There's now a mute sound option in gmail, click on the down arrow next to your name above the contacts list
- sssparkkk 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out, last time I checked there was no such thing.
nodata 13y ago
> And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' Can someone tell me what the green underline beneath an avatar meant then?
- MasterScrat 13y ago
  It's binary: you're there or not. You can't be idle or busy anymore, which sucks pretty hard for regular users.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    It's more than that: The Android app has no feedback at all. I have no idea even whether you're there or not. It's a complete clusterfuck, and orders of magnitude inferior to the old Google Talk app, which worked fantastically well.
    - theintern 13y ago
      This was literally fixed in the last day. There's now feedback similar to the browser app.
      - w1ntermute 13y ago
        https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13uvbygrw2zyfopw04chntihon0h5wggns0k https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13uvbygrw2zyfopw04... I wonder if the bug is related to these changes.
    - Plutor 13y ago
      Yeah, the lack of status is exactly why no one uses SMS for messaging.
      - StavrosK 13y ago
        If I didn't want to know if the recipient was currently online and could chat idly, I'd use SMS. (My brain short-circuited there for a moment when trying to form a reply to a comment that was both extremely sarcastic and ludicrously wrong. Hopefully the above meets all our expectations.)
      - scott_karana 13y ago
        Hangouts is realtime and shows "now typing" indicators, which aren't present in SMS. It's hard to see whether someone left, in which case better asynchronous communication should be used, or whether it's a lull in conversation.
bluecalm 13y ago
Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning. It also loses message regularly so I am now used to ask for copy pasting if it's obvious something got lost. Blatant disregard of things like sorting via status (or displaying that at all) or introducing more of them is another thing. It looks like some crazy manager designed his evil plan and convinced all his bosses that it's the way to go. The app sucks, everyone I know hates it, they forced feeded it to users with Android update with no way to go back to gtalk. It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done. Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. /rant
- freyr 13y ago
  I've noticed the same thing with Apple's Messages. Sometimes messages arrive on my phone, sometimes on the Messages application on my laptop, sometimes both. Even when a message arrives at both locations, there's often a significant delay between the arrivals. It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.
- ZoFreX 13y ago
  > Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?
- rryan 13y ago
  Killing the competition? There is lots of healthy competition in the messaging/chat space: Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc. If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists. Edited: to use more polite tone.
rzendacott 13y ago
Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. The lack of online status certainly hasn't been missed, as I've been using hangouts to completely replace SMS. It's way more convenient. With the Chrome extension, I have all of my messages without ever having to have a certain website or even Chrome open. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but I haven't run into any of those other problems. The only feature I'm waiting/hoping for is for it to be seamlessly integrated with SMS.
- bluecalm 13y ago
  So say you are a programmer and you have a coding problem. You have some friends which you know could help. You don't want to spam all of them but just ask the one who is available now. Just one use case for online statuses. Another one is, you know, you just want to chat with someone to make next 15 minutes pass and for that it would be nice to say "hi" to a person available for a quick chat right now.
- Peaker 13y ago
  Using gtalk for SMS was so much more convenient, because you could just press the contact icon, and get gtalk as an option. They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.
- mcpherrinm 13y ago
  It depends on your use case. Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore. So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.
  - 13y ago
marsvskittens 13y ago
Oh god, the notifications. There doesn't seem to be any intelligent targeting for them. Whenever I receive a message, every single client I have gets notified regardless of what I'm doing. If I'm actively typing into my android hangout client, chances are my tablets and my gmail tabs don't need to beep to let me know there's a new message.
apetresc 13y ago
You're forgetting the worst offender: the old Gchat let you tab through the input boxes of the different chats. On Hangouts, tab just cycles you through every UI element on the page.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  To be fair,that's the proper behavior the tab key on a desktop, and breaking from that is breaking the standard behavior. Offering a hotkey makes sense, but tab isn't it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- thirtyseven 13y ago
  Not sure why it isn't documented, but you can cycle through chat windows with Ctrl-. and Ctrl-,

liquid_x 13y ago

There's now a mute sound option in gmail, click on the down arrow next to your name above the contacts list

sssparkkk 13y ago
Thanks for pointing that out, last time I checked there was no such thing.

nodata 13y ago

> And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' Can someone tell me what the green underline beneath an avatar meant then?

MasterScrat 13y ago
It's binary: you're there or not. You can't be idle or busy anymore, which sucks pretty hard for regular users.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  It's more than that: The Android app has no feedback at all. I have no idea even whether you're there or not. It's a complete clusterfuck, and orders of magnitude inferior to the old Google Talk app, which worked fantastically well.
  - theintern 13y ago
    This was literally fixed in the last day. There's now feedback similar to the browser app.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13uvbygrw2zyfopw04chntihon0h5wggns0k https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13uvbygrw2zyfopw04... I wonder if the bug is related to these changes.
  - Plutor 13y ago
    Yeah, the lack of status is exactly why no one uses SMS for messaging.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      If I didn't want to know if the recipient was currently online and could chat idly, I'd use SMS. (My brain short-circuited there for a moment when trying to form a reply to a comment that was both extremely sarcastic and ludicrously wrong. Hopefully the above meets all our expectations.)
    - scott_karana 13y ago
      Hangouts is realtime and shows "now typing" indicators, which aren't present in SMS. It's hard to see whether someone left, in which case better asynchronous communication should be used, or whether it's a lull in conversation.

bluecalm 13y ago

Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning. It also loses message regularly so I am now used to ask for copy pasting if it's obvious something got lost. Blatant disregard of things like sorting via status (or displaying that at all) or introducing more of them is another thing. It looks like some crazy manager designed his evil plan and convinced all his bosses that it's the way to go. The app sucks, everyone I know hates it, they forced feeded it to users with Android update with no way to go back to gtalk. It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done. Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. /rant

freyr 13y ago
I've noticed the same thing with Apple's Messages. Sometimes messages arrive on my phone, sometimes on the Messages application on my laptop, sometimes both. Even when a message arrives at both locations, there's often a significant delay between the arrivals. It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.
ZoFreX 13y ago
> Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?
rryan 13y ago
Killing the competition? There is lots of healthy competition in the messaging/chat space: Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc. If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists. Edited: to use more polite tone.

rzendacott 13y ago

Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. The lack of online status certainly hasn't been missed, as I've been using hangouts to completely replace SMS. It's way more convenient. With the Chrome extension, I have all of my messages without ever having to have a certain website or even Chrome open. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but I haven't run into any of those other problems. The only feature I'm waiting/hoping for is for it to be seamlessly integrated with SMS.

bluecalm 13y ago
So say you are a programmer and you have a coding problem. You have some friends which you know could help. You don't want to spam all of them but just ask the one who is available now. Just one use case for online statuses. Another one is, you know, you just want to chat with someone to make next 15 minutes pass and for that it would be nice to say "hi" to a person available for a quick chat right now.
Peaker 13y ago
Using gtalk for SMS was so much more convenient, because you could just press the contact icon, and get gtalk as an option. They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.
mcpherrinm 13y ago
It depends on your use case. Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore. So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.
- 13y ago

marsvskittens 13y ago

Oh god, the notifications. There doesn't seem to be any intelligent targeting for them. Whenever I receive a message, every single client I have gets notified regardless of what I'm doing. If I'm actively typing into my android hangout client, chances are my tablets and my gmail tabs don't need to beep to let me know there's a new message.

apetresc 13y ago

You're forgetting the worst offender: the old Gchat let you tab through the input boxes of the different chats. On Hangouts, tab just cycles you through every UI element on the page.

Pxtl 13y ago
To be fair,that's the proper behavior the tab key on a desktop, and breaking from that is breaking the standard behavior. Offering a hotkey makes sense, but tab isn't it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
thirtyseven 13y ago
Not sure why it isn't documented, but you can cycle through chat windows with Ctrl-. and Ctrl-,