331–340 of 504 posts
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They have already mail email incompatible. They haven't changed protocol but best of luck if you run your own email server.
I got good mileage with the mail server on cloudron. Also, mail-tester.com is awesome to check spammyness.
At this point I have no idea which Google chat client is which. A few years ago I remember having Google Talk on my android phone. Then after some random update the application disappeared from my phone and was replaced with hangouts. Now is Google Talk the same as GChat? Was Hangouts anything more than just a new branding for Google Talk? I have no idea. And what's up with this Google Allo thing? Again, it seems lik…
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Korea mandated through legislation that all online shopping had to go through ActiveX controls, because that was the only way to guarantee secure encryption at the time. Now it's practically the least secure way to online shop and even Microsoft recommends not using ActiveX, but it's a huge amount of work to strip that infrastructure out and make everything work 'properly' so it's still an issue even today. In short,…
That's a good point - especially important if someone's thinking about legislating a particular technology. On the other hand, maybe in this case it would be enough to legislate a requirement for openness of the protocol? I.e. whatever it is, if it has enough many users, it has to be fully available to third party integrations.
Boy, do I regret giving so many people my GV number and using it as a main phone number... They are also removing Hangouts' SMS integration, BUT: > Note: This change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS. That doesn't really make me feel great, it's only a matter of time before it changes again, and I'm quite sure the experience of staying in Hangouts will be a…
I'm thinking about porting my GV number away from Google, if that is even possible. Voice used to be the best thing ever, but now it has a shadow of it's original functionality.
I ported my T-Mobile number into GV in 2013 when I switched to Android and Hangouts first added GV/SMS integration, so that I could send SMS from the desktop.
Then I ported my number back out to T-Mobile again in 2015 when I switched back to an iPhone and regained iMessage.
Boy, do I regret giving so many people my GV number and using it as a main phone number... They are also removing Hangouts' SMS integration, BUT: > Note: This change does not impact Google Voice users who may continue to use Hangouts for their Google Voice SMS. That doesn't really make me feel great, it's only a matter of time before it changes again, and I'm quite sure the experience of staying in Hangouts will be a…
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This may be a little dramatic, but I feel like I have to say it. Everything is ephemeral. Google's problem is that they don't keep services around long enough nor do they plan a reasonable migration strategy for when they shutter them.
Ephemeral is okay. But having three (four? I honestly don't know) competing services from a single provider and playing "guess which one's the evil twin" is shitty.
* Allo (text chat)
* Duo (video chat)
* Android Messages (SMS etc.)
(And Google Voice also does SMS iirc)
And of course Hangouts, which is able to do all of those currently, but is going to be split up into different business-oriented apps for some reason.
If Allo and Duo had just been another client for whatever protocol Hangouts uses these days, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But like it is now, I don’t feel like I can ‘rely’ on Google at all. Facebook Messenger has been a far more stable experience, even though I have some reservations about it.
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The world made it impossible to roll your own server, not Google. The proliferation of spammers in email has necessitated a cottage industry of security and filtering and all manner of mechanisms, automated and otherwise, to deal with the avalanche of bullshit streaming through that protocol. Google's the blame party for a lot of things, but not the loss of email freedom.
This is not true. There are email standards out there to help prevent spam. But right now Google simply ignores all this even if everything is setup correctly. I think Google has a responsibility in helping me debug _why_ an email is spam and give tools to fix it. Currently, there is 0 information, 0 support. The webmaster tools simply say everything is awesome and dandy. And you can't do anything else. Here is today…
Here's what I don't get about Google. A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they're all dead. Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and light…
Just because you use Google's stuff all around doesn't mean Google were "one of the only players...."
Google was a distant third in IM behind MS and Yahoo.
I've never seen a Zebra doesn't mean the Zebra doesn't exist.
I've been avoiding Google Hangouts because when it first shipped you had to sign up to Google Plus. Does anyone know if that is still the case? I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years due to the Google Plus requirement there also.
Same. I purposefully stopped reviewing products on the Play/App store as soon as they forced you to use your G+ profile. Why on Earth does my real name or main profile need to be associated with a short app review?
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If ever there was a software example of killing the goose with the golden eggs. Imagine if they thought like that about email?
Google Wave was supposed to replace email. But actually they replaced email with gmail. Now you can't send email from your own server because it will be blacklisted on gmail by default and noone on gmail will receive these emails. So you have to use "cloud email providers". On Android they changed "Email" client to "Gmail" client.
No, they didn't. Those are two separate apps. The Email one is part of AOSP. The Gmail one is part of Google Apps. Although many OEMs roll their own email client, as part of their custom skin.