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The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

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181–190 of 402 posts

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

#181

Post by notatoad »

tehlike wrote: post #152
scotchio wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopping from text to video in a single click is cool... But the #1 thing that stops me from even considering buying an Android device is "it's not iMessage". iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic. No hassle at all and I can blue bubble send perfection to any other iPhone-r. It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly. I think that's what is really missing. People don't mind opening an…

"iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic." I don't think i got what you are saying... What do you mean automatic?

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.

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

#182

Post by fencepost »

jaimex2 wrote: post #136
dbcooper wrote: post #3

Just a conplete mess.

Its turned into a massive joke. They can create amazing machine learning and AI systems, can't put together a consistent chat app - stuff thats been around since the beginning of the Internet.

I think that joke must include a dozen highly skilled but poorly socialized engineers in a conference room completely failing to communicate about communicating.

I'm just not sure if it's a comedy, a satire or a tragedy.

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

#183

Post by Latteland »

woogiewonka wrote: post #127
stupidbird wrote: post #27

How are they still getting this wrong. One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.

It's like nobody at Google uses an iPhone or has heard of Facetime. "Oh look, there's an app that lets you call and at a tap of a button turns that call into video! I wonder if we should do something similar?" "- nah, that would be too easy."

I've had that for 10 years with google. I don't understand. I look at a contact while in gmail, click on it to go to hangouts and click the video call button.

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

#184

Post by krackers »

rmykhajliw wrote: post #165

I was a user of hangouts for the last 10 years already since a closed for public alpha-beta. It was wonderful product for companies, for teams. It was so easy to create a meeting (because it had an integration with google calendar) invite everyone, add some people phone number to join the same conversation. It just worked and it was the best on the market. Then Google decided to kill this product one by one removing…

What's really annoying is that they killed off the one thing that was closest to a desktop client [the one seen here: https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extensio...] and had unintrusive windows that could be made floating, or docked/minimzed to the bottom of the screen. It was incredibly productive.

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

#185

Post by elcomet »

blhack wrote: post #168

Forgive me for being a bit daft, but: What do all of these messenger clients and things bring to the table that didn't already exist on AOL instant messenger 20 years ago? Slack seems like (badly) redone IRC. My computer 20 years ago could run mIRC without issue, and yet my brand new modern macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram chokes on the slack client. WHY? Hangouts seems like (badly) redone AIM. For some unbelievable r…

I really don't agree with you

For Slack / IRC: Slack is a much easier IRC: you don't need a bouncer to keep your session open, you can easily send files / images / videos, code snippets, a lot of integrations are baked in and work very well.

For hangouts / AIM: Can you do video chat on AIM ?

Also, for AIM, you still need someone to maintain the server, but I don't think people are ready to pay for chat. And they But why would a company host for free a server for an open protocol like AIM ? Why do you think we don't see more big companies behind it?

Also, I think voice chats work very well with facebook messenger (I don't remember that it worked that well in the golden era of AIM and MSN messenger).

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

#188

Post by Cookingboy »

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…

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 the early Gmail days and kept investing in it.

That's just not what Google was back then. It was all about PMs/designers wanting to jump onto the shinest and newest projects and lots of politics were involved to win support/attention/resources from the top management.

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

#189

Post by Latteland »

prepend wrote: post #125
brendanmc6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardware specific! Most of the planet is on Android. If there is a way to do iMessage on Android, I can at least say that not many people know how.

The only “green” people I know are google employees and my mom, who can’t afford an iPhone. The solution is simple to their problem- buy an iPhone. It’s almost like the iPhone is a fetish or totem that grants access to iMessage (although you can message from macos or iCloud.com impractically). It’s quite strange how this is a very simple, solved, problem for iPhone for many years. Google can fix it by literally cloni…

Okay, your experience is ... not representative. In this world there are tons of people using iphones, tons of other people using android. You see both frequently. There happen to be way more people using android but it doesn't matter, because there are sizable numbers using both, we should only consider solutions that work on both.

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

#190

Post by piyush_soni »

wpietri wrote: post #129
Eridrus wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like Duo is working out. It has more than 500m installs, and isn't installed by default, so it's numbers aren't padded the same way Hangouts' are. Allo, despite being shut down got to about the same size as Signal.

Are you sure it's not installed by default for at least some people? I never installed it, but it's on my Google Pixel.

It's installed by default only on the Pixels.
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