I've never liked Hangouts. It was a very poorly done, poorly thought out and unfinished app that runs very slow on my old phone. That's why to this day I keep u

I've never liked Hangouts. It was a very poorly done, poorly thought out and unfinished app that runs very slow on my old phone. That's why to this day I keep using Talk. The Gmail version of Hangouts hasn't been any better, and I've kept using Talk there too as long as I could, until there was that big privacy bug sending people's messages to other people, and I decided to switch to Hangouts. But wouldn't have done it otherwise. There's also the privacy issues. Google keeps refusing to provide proper privacy for communications that are really supposed to be private, and should be none of their damn business, data mining or not. I've said it before, as soon as there are privacy-friendly alternatives to Google's app that look good and not like they were designed in 1999 user-hostile, I'll move away from their services. I'm already planning on recommending everyone I know to use TextSecure/Whisper, and I'll do the same as soon as a good DarkMail-based (ugh, yes I cringe at the name, too) client is available (and if the protocol doesn't turn out to be snake oil, of course). Google should learn from what happened to MtGox, or I could even push the analogy with the recent mass protests/revolutions - if you keep people frustrated long enough and aren't answering to their concerns, they are going to dump you like there's no tomorrow, in a mass-exodus once there's a really good alternative or your latest blunder is so big they can't take it anymore. Also, whether it's Google+ or Hangouts, Google has gained a bad habit of thinking that if they "own" a platform, they can push whatever crap they want at the users, and force them into using it - and they'll gain market share in that market like magic! Wrong. What they'll get is at best very little engagement with their app or service, and a lot of pissed off users in the process, that weren't pissed off with Google's other services before, but now are.