241–250 of 543 posts
I wonder how many users will come to depend on it before they shut it down.
This is overblown, the biggest thing they did this to was Reader, and that was hardly an "ecosystem" app without any way to use a stand-in replacement within minutes.
It was a full-blown social network for a while.
Does anyone know how the app preview message notifications[1] are implemented? Is it open to us third party app developers? [1] When a message is sent to someone without Allo installed, they'll still receive a notification and can reply directly from it https://support.google.com/allo/answer/6385770
A good occasion to send another complaint to http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_document...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the way they see it is: Voice is basically deprecated Hangouts is enterprise Allo and Duo compete with Whatsapp/iMessage and Facetime/Skype respectively
but hangouts lacks things which are useful for enterprises such as video recording (it's possible only if you make a "hangout on air", afaiu) and, in my experience, screen sharing text/code is painful because of the video encoding making it unreadable. To me hangouts looks like a competitor to Skype only, at this time.
I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. It's a great cross-platform video chat app. I especially like the feature where you can see the other party before you answer their call. I have taken calls because of that feature that I otherwise wouldn't have. It's better than FaceTime because it works on Android. It's better than Skype and Google Hangouts because your cellphone number is your identity; you don'…
I think there are other reasons, but I really dislike using my phone number as an ID. Phone numbers are much harder to change , so if some annoying person gets a hold of it suddenly they can harass me across networks. This is a thing that actually happens! A big reason why I don't like telegram (even if everything else is awesome). I'm cool with my account being linked to a phone number, but I'd rather avoid giving t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the end, I see all these apps dying. Even hangouts is crappy. They don't have a native mac client. Hangouts was a decent chat app they had. I wish they promoted hangouts as cross platform and as a competitor to both whatsapp and skype.
The Mac client for Hangouts got a big upgrade. It's not really native, but more like Slack (Electron).
I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. It's a great cross-platform video chat app. I especially like the feature where you can see the other party before you answer their call. I have taken calls because of that feature that I otherwise wouldn't have. It's better than FaceTime because it works on Android. It's better than Skype and Google Hangouts because your cellphone number is your identity; you don'…
> I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. The market is incredibly saturated in the chat space. Google keeps creating new things with new names (which they will eventually kill off) and the rest of the market is just completely saturated. WeChat, WhatsApp, Skype, FaceTime, Messenger, SnapChat, HangOuts; and that's the short list. It's getting out of hand. The chat model is incredibly difficult to monetiz…
I wonder what the long term vision is. More data harvesting for advertising? Become the de facto platform for services offered through your chat network? The latter reminds of how every company needed a presence in Second Life to engage with customers and leads…
I really wish they wouldn't overload terms that they themselves invented. In Chrome, "incognito" means we don't save your local history, but it does not add to the transport security. Here, "incognito" means you've got end-to-end encryption (and presumably also doesn't save local history). Why on earth would you re-use the same term when naming two things with similar (thus easily confused) consumer-visible attribute…
Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature (http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/21/12994362/allo-privacy-mess...)
Performance for privacy - LOL
So now google has Voice, Messenger, Hangouts, Allo, and Duo all with overlapping functionality? I wish they would just focus on making Hangouts work really well.
Apple runs on Intelligent Design. You have a room full of geniuses who decide what to build, make sure it fits perfectly into their overall product portfolio with minimal overlap or cannibalization, spend years in a dark secret room building it until it's perfectly polished, and then do a big-bang launch.
Google on the other hand, runs on evolution. You've got tens of thousands of smart people all over the company, each with their own cool ideas and visions. Director #1 decides it would be cool to have a single unified messaging/video app that works across all platforms; Director #2 decides it would be cool to have a messaging app that's perfectly customized for mobile phones and Random-Guy #3 decides to do a 20℅ project on a messaging app that integrates AI functionality. Instead of trying to pick a winner, and telling everyone else to abandon their projects, Google allows all 3 visions to play themselves out on a small scale, and then doubles down on the winner. Rather than having a perfect product portfolio like Apple, Google is almost like an incubator, full of interesting ideas and projects, even if they lack the structure that comes with Central Planning.
The downside of course, is brand confusion and dilution. People looking for a messaging app, and not having the time to explore all options thoroughly, will have a hard time figuring out which Google-messaging-app to go with. If they pick a non-optimal one, it's going to hurt the Google brand in their eyes. But the upside is innovation. Allowing multiple ideas to play themselves out at the same time, allows for so much more innovation, experimentation and iteration. And ultimately, I think those are the qualities that Google wants to prioritize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still have their XMPP as well, but they never enabled SSL so it sends messages in plaintext and won't federate to modern XMPP servers/clients. What a clusterfuck of a company.
Calling Google a clusterfuck of a company is appalling. They would not do this without a strategic thought. Even Facebook has Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and FB itself. All doing pretty well.