The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

Post by pavanagrawal123 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:58 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #101

pavanagrawal123 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.

Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.

Post by dkhenry » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:59 AM UTC

Eridrus wrote: post #72

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.

Post by scotchio » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

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…

Post by maccam94 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #75

killjoywashere wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 insa…

Post by niftich » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:05 AM UTC

Eridrus wrote: post #76

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.