171–180 of 379 posts
Wow this is so much the future... Between my 4g video native capability, skype (remember), facetime, etc. that was missing. Thank you Google for putting well-paid engineers to solvant this.
How does this add any value above existing products that do the same?
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> Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.
At least it doesn't only run on Apple devices, like the complete joke that is FaceTime.
Facetime is just a feature. It's a calling option in contacts and any phone call to another iPhone can be turned into a facetime call at the push of a button. That means you don't even need to think about it. There's no install process, no configuration, no account to set up, it's just there.
Furthermore because it can rely on guaranteed hardware features it has the best compression, bandwidth utilization and image quality in the business. If it's a joke, I'm not sure who it is that's doing the laughing.
Is there anything currently that works similarly without a google or Facebook account? My dad is so computer/phone illiterate that he cannot/won't register for either of these. It should work across iPhone/Android. I ask because video calling between my son and my dad is no longer as simple as FaceTime after I switched to Android
[1]: https://www.wire.com
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I'll trust that Google knows what they're doing when implementing encryption.
Sure, but I also don't trust them to not harvest data from calls by side-channels for advertising purposes.
Reverse Engineering is the only viable way of determining this stuff. I'd love for it to be open source but it has nothing to do with this.
Why would one use this when similar functionality (Hangouts video streaming) has just been killed and moved to Youtube Live?
At any rate these have different use cases, one is enterprise focused and the other is mobile only.
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Yea I think the US is definitely an outlier there; Out of the couple dozen countries I've visited recently outside of the US, Whatsapp seems like hands-down the most popular messaging app (whereas in the US, almost no one I know uses it unless they're in frequent contact with a non-trivial number of foreigners).
A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. In lots of other countries you pay several cents for each individual text message and MMS cost several tens of cents. And this is for domestic messages. With international messages (which you often use because you're country is likely to be much smaller than the US…
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Someone should build a meta video calling app: Make a normal phone call, and if the app detects that both parties have a common video calling app installed on their devices, the meta app notifies the caller ("Press * for video") and helps reconnect the call with the video calling app.
Hmm that's how iPhone works.
End-to-end encrypted but not opensource is just trusting that it's really (well)encrypted. Thanks, but no thanks.
I'll trust that Google knows what they're doing when implementing encryption.