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Updates to our Google Voice apps

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Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#321

Post by saurik »

jfoster wrote: post #258
saurik wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was this "a time", and did it include more than Mail, Maps, and Docs?

Yes, it also included Android, Chrome, Analytics, News, Reader.

Ok: I explicitly considered Android and did not consider it a product (though this was probably wrong of me), and I feel like Reader is disqualified as Google decided it failed and killed it when they should have used it as a basis for other projects (the thing they always do :/), but thanks for reminding me of Analytics and Chrome! (Is News successful?!? I always tried to use it and it never really seemed to accomplish anything, and now they seem to be attaching its fate to AMP, which is either going to win so hard they end up taking control of the entire Internet, or is going to finally kill it...)

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#323

Post by tedmiston »

wlesieutre wrote: post #69
jitl wrote: post #14

I used to use my Google Voice number as my primary contact number, but when development of the product seemingly died for three years without addressing outstanding issues with group MMS or picture messages, I migrated back to my regular cell number. I've already told all my friends to forget my Google Voice number. I've changed my preferences in every service I use to contact my regular cell number. Now Google is so…

That's about where I am with this. I got started with GV back when carriers were charging $0.25/each to send or receive texts, and eventually paid Google $20 to port my old AT&T number into their system. Then Google stopped developing the GV app and I switched from iOS to Android to get the Hangouts Dialer integration. With the Hangouts integration instead of a real GV app, they apparently threw away the spam reporti…

> I got started with GV back when carriers were charging $0.25/each to send or receive texts

What? Unlimited texting has been included in every phone plan I've ever had since the first iPhone or earlier, before Google Voice existed.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#324

Post by njovin »

throwthisawayt wrote: post #26

As an xoogler, this tells me that the voice team is now staffed again. It also tells me that the executive team is thinking about reducing headcount and focus on hangouts, but still are uncertain. Finally, it tells me that google still has no idea how to crack the messaging space, and has so no team internally that is taking charge but a bunch of teams with different approaches, all jockeying for executive support. G…

Facebook has done a pretty poor job of unifying their messaging offering with WhatsApp. Long-time WhatsApp users may see this as a blessing but it's odd that you have seemingly competing teams owned by the same company putting out competing products, one of which has an outstanding API and the other which is basically a walled garden.

Google was in a unique position to deliver a best-in-class messaging client and own the space: they have more users than Facebook or Apple and more good will than either of those companies (based on my own personal opinion and interactions).

Despite that, they've had numerous messaging platforms: Google Talk, Waze (kind of), Hangouts, and Google Voice. I wouldn't call any of them great products - they've all done barely good enough to stay useful, falling short in the areas of cross-platform reliability, group messaging, and multimedia messaging. Meanwhile companies like Slack are eating their lunch. I love Slack (and have in fact moved to using a private Slack team for personal messaging among friends) but it still saddens me a bit that a Google has failed to deliver a solid offering here.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#325

Post by tedmiston »

rconti wrote: post #263
komali2 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "desperately force our users to stay in our ecosystem" is a very successful business model.

Steve Jobs famously believed in cannibalizing their own sales. (Or, to be less charitably, he believed in that when it was convenient to believe that). Whether the culture has carried over, who knows. Even as an iPhone user, I never would have thought iMessage was even in the top 5 or 10 reasons to keep using the platform. But I'm old, don't text all that much, and have unlimited SMS anyway. I imagine all the cool ki…

> I imagine all the cool kids these days are using alternative data-based services anyway.

Yes and no, because friend groups are fragmented across services and iMessage or text is the common denominator, especially for group messages.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#326

Post by tedmiston »

Dibes wrote: post #298
rconti wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs famously believed in cannibalizing their own sales. (Or, to be less charitably, he believed in that when it was convenient to believe that). Whether the culture has carried over, who knows. Even as an iPhone user, I never would have thought iMessage was even in the top 5 or 10 reasons to keep using the platform. But I'm old, don't text all that much, and have unlimited SMS anyway. I imagine all the cool ki…

It's not necessarily the experience on the phone that is lacking in other SMS based apps on competing platforms -- I see it as the ability to leverage being able to message anyone from most platforms be it conputer, iPad, or phone and have it all in sync. That to me is the massive draw to it.

I kind of wonder if there isn't more to this. Perhaps it's why Continuity [1] never fulfilled its full vision of moving seamlessly between iOS and macOS. Lack of support for third party apps, especially messaging apps, felt intentional.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Yosemite#Continuity

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#327

Post by tedmiston »

threeseed wrote: post #250
dragonwriter wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the specific root cause is that messaging is actually a number of different spaces with different ideal solutions, which I think Google is starting to get even though I don't think they've yet actually nailed any of the subspaces (or even necessarily correctly not identified exactly what they are.)

Except that Apple and Facebook managed to largely nail all of the spaces with a single app.

Facebook also nailed cross-platform native and web.

I really like the messenger.com [1] version of the client.

[1]: https://www.messenger.com/

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#328

Post by tedmiston »

DennisAleynikov wrote: post #59
LinkDJ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... it is a VOIP number.

I also switched from Voice to Fi and it's technically a VoIP number transferred to the Fi MVNO... Not sure why that fails the VoIP test, I'm paying for normal phone service but it's not legit enough???

I'm not sure how one validates whether a VoIP number is being used for VoIP vs as a "real" phone number but this seems like a curious edge case.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#329

Post by eridius »

stock_toaster wrote: post #268
fooey wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening iMessage to other platforms would cannibalize iOS sales. I hear soo many people say they'd try Android, but they can't lose iMessage

Apple wanted to open it up, supposedly, but I read somewhere that they were apparently blocked by lawsuits with VirnetX (an apparent NPE/patent-troll), ongoing since 2010.

You may be thinking of FaceTime. Apple was going to open that, but a successful lawsuit by a patent troll (I think it was VirnetX) put a stop to that, because Apple had to change FaceTime to proxy through their own servers, which meant that opening it up wouldn't do any good.

That said, VirnetX has also sued Apple about iMessage, so it's possible there's something to what you've said (but I've never heard it said before that Apple was going to open up iMessage).

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#330

Post by tedmiston »

mrb wrote: post #45
nemesisj wrote: post #17

I've been a Google Voice user for 6-7 years. It became more important to me 5 years ago when I moved to the UK and ported my mobile number to GV. It's not been very pretty. We were thrown a lifeline with the Google Hangouts app taking over for the absolutely-awful Google Voice app. One of the most frustrating things about GV is that for certain SMS providers, it fails the "is this a USA number test" or "can we SMS to…

Not being able to text non-US phone numbers from Google Voice is my number one issue with the service. Living in the US, when I receive an occasional text from my distant family members in Europe, I can't text a reply, I can't call right now (because of the timezone difference), and I can't email (some of them don't have email).

I feel like this is the area WhatsApp and Kik dominated: communicating with all of your friends across countries or outside of the US.
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