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The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

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Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#71

Post by nicoburns »

ericabiz wrote: post #59
sdinsn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat & Meet are for businesses, and Allo is ending. So the vast majority need to only keep up with 3.

There’s a Googler in here who wrote a comment on this post: “I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.” I just don’t know. I’m at a complete loss for words on how Google can screw this up so badly. We actually use Hangouts every day for our business. I have been advocating a move to Slack.

We found we got a nice boost in call quality when we moved to from hangouts to slack. zoom.us is also good.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#72

Post by Eridrus »

dkhenry wrote: post #32

What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete…

Signal and Allo actually have a similar number of installs, they're both in the 10-50m installs bucket in the Play store.

I use Signal, but it's fine at best, but it's not really going to break out of it's niche.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#74

Post by paulryanrogers »

mrkstu wrote: post #65
brendanmc6 wrote: post #51

I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal. In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be. I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up…

This is the brilliance of iMessage where it gets critical mass- fallback to SMS but pushing the iMessage identity tied to an account that follows you to new phones/devices. I think that iMessage network effect is a big reason for the steady market share growth of iPhone in the US- none of the competitive apps have cross-generational appeal, just iMessage.

Wouldn't a federated solution be better though? After all email and SMS are decentralized, albeit somewhat archaic.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#75

Post by npunt »

killjoywashere wrote: post #39
tehlike wrote: post #8

The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words. Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with fami…

> blog post is very confusing at best Yeah, there's clarity at the end, but there could have been a cartoon in 4 frames: Frame 1: icons of Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Messaging Frame 2: Hangouts splits into Meet and Chat (5 things) Frame 3: Duo, Messaging, Meet annd Chat arranged in a 2x2 grid of (messaging, phone/video) x (consumer, business), with Allo still hanging above Frame 4: Allo getting squeezed into Messaging.

You're onto something. This should be a chart though, and encompass the whole scope of Google's attempts at messaging over the years. Plot out all the bundling (Hangouts & G+) and unbundling (Allo's features -> Messages) like xkcd's movie narrative charts: https://xkcd.com/657/

At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#76

Post by Eridrus »

nyrulez wrote: post #5

It has to hurt somewhere inside Google to kill Allo but not Duo. I honestly expected the opposite given the original push behind these apps. The problem with all these messaging experiences is that none of them work well on both dekstop and mobile. They seem to be optimized one way or the other. If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging…

Duo has at least 10x more installs on the Play store, it's pretty clear that Duo has succeeded, while Allo has failed.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#77

Post by briandear »

sorenjan wrote: post #37
justinplouffe wrote: post #31

If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.

Yes and no. You can use their Messages web client, but it's still going to be SMS to and from your phone. It's a contrived and pretty ugly solution IMO. https://messages.android.com/

Good grief. It seems like they are doing everything possible to not make something as good as Apple Messages. Data chat without a phone number, interoperability with conventional SMS and the ability to start an instant FaceTime. And with Group FaceTime, it’s even more compelling. You can even do audio only or start a real phone call or send a video or audio message, all in one place. Other than org politics, I can’t understand why Google messaging services are a convoluted mess. I need a flowchart just to understand it all.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#78

Post by yodon »

Genuine question here, as I've read both the post and all the comments here and I still can't figure this out: Does this blog post say google's consumer text messaging strategy is now "send an email?"

I read the post as saying Messages is for Android consumer text messaging, Duo for cross-platform consumer video, and Hangouts for enterprise text and video. That doesn't seem to leave anything for friends doing text chat outside of Android.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#80

Post by ronreiter »

Oh my god - Google really has the worst product management etiquette in the world.

It’s not hard. Look around you for what works and what doesn’t and copy that.

The post is also confusing and hard to get the bottom line out of it. Just write “we are killing Allo”.

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