The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

arwineap wrote: post #264

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…

Project fi actually DEPENDS on hangouts. At some point in the last year, I wanted to jump into the "new chat ecosystem" and so I uninstalled hangouts to break bad habits. The entire phone becomes unable to connect to any network. I love hangouts, and I wish RCS could just roll into it; but how did project fi end up so integrated?

Post by isolli » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #218

smt88 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to know an even more stupid rebrand? A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.

There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it. The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to m…

Post by Cookingboy » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:34 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #281

Cookingboy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth. >Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from t…

This is a great behind the scenes view. What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).

Post by aerique » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

crottypeter wrote: post #272

notatoad wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you message somebody, and they get the message. you don't have to think about what app you're using or what app they're using.

Also it's very hard to debug... A friend on iOS think he has sent you a (SMS) text message. You don't get it on your (non-apple) phone. You don't get it on your (non-apple) work computer. Three weeks later you log on to your iMac/mac-mini/whatever that you hardly ever use to find messages from whoever uses apple phones and has your email address on their contacts. It turns out that logging in to your desktop PC can l…

Post by bufferoverflow » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #220

jordanthoms wrote: post #164

This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the ear…

Yes. Their explanation also didn't make much sense since Hangouts was targeted for a while to consumers. But what I got from this is basically: Messages iMessage Duo Facetime Hangouts Slack I think they should rename the Hangouts to something completely different. That at least will increase clarity for consumers and businesses.