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 early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.
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 family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop.
Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.
Same. I adore hangouts, ugly and 'outdated' as it is. With Fi/Voice, it integrates perfectly as to call or text from any internet device. And who cares about wifi calling or volte support when with hangouts, everything is over data always and more reliable. Killing it is a mistake. It's the only Google product I'd gladly pay a monthly fee to use...
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 another app to place call / facetime / hangout video. They want simple, clear phone messaging that isn't an "app"
I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed over time. Also, it's important to distinguish Allo from Hangouts from the account perspective. Allo is phone # tied, like WhatsApp/Telegram. So definitely trying to go after a different market segment. It just failed.
Duo continues to be awesome. Being a FaceTime competitor that is cross-platform is great. No account needed, just simply start a video chat from your address book (or from the App).
Hangouts is... something special. There are clearly reasons things happened the way they did. But I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.
What you see as throwing shit at the wall, looks like testing market hypothesis to me.
Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.
Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.
This seems to me the start of what happened to GMail. As for Hangouts, it seems that this announcement suggests that Hangouts is moving to become a primarily G Suite brand.
Messaging:
you have what you have now,
Messages as a vanilla messaging app
Allo and Duo as flavored products focusing on particular features for messaging.
Email:
GMail as vanilla
Inbox as a GTD-flavored that is having its most used features is being folded back into GMail.
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?
Messages mixes up SMS with chat, exactly what I don't want. SMS messages are usually used for couriers notifying about delivery, and spam. I use an SMS-only app on Android to make sure things don't get mixed up. I don't need SMS junk in my chats.
I'm pretty sure this blog post was forced due to the recent articles about Hangouts and Allo on 9to5google.com [0], [1].
Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution.
If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now.
Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.
Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations.
Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like.
I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.
I've been in many come-to-Jesus meetings wherein Leadership acknowledges their strategic failures, then busts out a presentation detailing the New Strategy, consisting of mild tweaks of the Existing Strategy.
Mild tweaks are great because they spare Leadership the pain of making hard decisions.
> And by refocusing on Messages and Duo for consumers and Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team collaboration
"Instead of working on five products, we're 'refocusing' down to four products." Right.
This has the stench of a post-faction justification that expertly avoids stepping on too many toes. IME Leadership gets axed by Senior Leadership not too long after.
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 them.
signal on desktop it's next to useless and good luck sharing pictures through signal, which it's basic functionality they haven't fixed for years, who is fine with sharing pictures one by one? what is this 90s?
I saw the title and thought: "Finally, they're going to admit to what a mess they've created and propose a way forward". But nope, just a PR fluff post.
FAQ: how start a video call using Google products?
Answer: Go to Gmail and send an email to the other party "can you Skype now?".
Literally. I had to schedule a video call recently by email. There is simply no formulation to schedule a video call using the name of one of google's products.
"Can you Hangout tomorrow?",
"Can you Duo tomorrow",
"Can you chat with Allo tomorrow?".
Nothing would work without confusing the other party with some probability. "Can you Skype tomorrow" always works, with everyone, no confusion.
Is this a joke? That whole blog post reads like satire.
Communicating with the people in our lives is one of the most important things we do every day, whether it’s chatting with friends about an upcoming trip, calling mom to check in, or touching base with colleagues.
So when I'm forced to move off hangouts for those connections that I still user over it - what do you think the chances are that I will choose a google product?
Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gaming circles.
Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.
They could... if their own messaging strategy wasn’t almost as bad as Google’s. Skype just got a top-to-bottom redesign that everyone hates, and Teams (which may or may not be the replacement for Lync, or Skype for Business, or whatever it’s called now) is like a checklist of everything terrible about Electron applications: it’s slow as molasses, uses boatloads of memory, and has no integration with the host OS. It’s actually worse than Slack, which is an impressive feat!
There’s something hilariously tragic about this being the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to deliver Google a coup-de-grace on messaging, and they can’t do it because they’re just as incompetent.
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.
Last time I had the Skype app installed it was trying to clone Snapchat and crashed when I tried to message someone. Admittedly that was a while ago, but I'm not sure where they were trying to go with it.
While we are a Google shop for the most part when it comes to messaging, we use Skype for colleagues in China or when traveling there. It is far better quality compared to Hangouts in the Great Firewall.
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 my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.
And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.
And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.
And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...
On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.
I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said.
What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)
EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
| Text | Video
Business | Chat | Meet
Personal | Messages | Duo
I guess that makes a lot more sense... I just wish I knew why four separate apps are needed in the first place.
Why can't text and audio/video be supported in the same app? Skype, Hangouts, HipChat (RIP) and many other messaging programs have been doing it for ages. It's simple and intuitive.
The Hangouts Chat/Meet split is particularly confusing. Aside from supporting more people in a call, I really don't understand what makes a Meet call better than the old Hangouts calls. My confusion is only compounded by Google's continued support for calls on the old Hangouts (now "Hangouts Chat"?).
Is there really such a big difference between an enterprise chat service and a personal one? Companies were turning to Hangouts long before Google announced it would become an enterprise-focused service.
HipChat (RIP) and Slack have obvious enterprise features that would seem out-of-place in a personal chat app... but Hangouts doesn't have any such features. It became popular without them. Why change your development focus all of the sudden? Why not continue marching towards a unified communications app and let the enterprise customers just do their thing?
I'm sure, given proper context and information, most of the decisions leading up to this point make sense in isolation. Still, Google really needs to sit down and figure out where they want all these apps to be in 5 years because - though I'm far from the first (or last) to say it - this is a mess.
I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up?
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.
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 woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.
I should take my timeline of Google's chat fumbles [1] and keep it updated. A lot has happened since. But Allo's stagnation has been known since April 2018 [2], and "classic" Hangouts' decline has long been suspected in light of the new services also prefixed by the same name.
This post seemed like it might cut the BS and explain what's going on, but it's tinged with PR platitudes and is unacceptably unclear and nonchalant about "classic" Hangouts' fate. They're basically saying they'll shut it down soon but not quite yet.
[+] [-] jordanthoms|7 years ago|reply
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 early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.
[+] [-] tehlike|7 years ago|reply
Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop.
Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.
[+] [-] axaxs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotchio|7 years ago|reply
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 another app to place call / facetime / hangout video. They want simple, clear phone messaging that isn't an "app"
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kyrra|7 years ago|reply
I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed over time. Also, it's important to distinguish Allo from Hangouts from the account perspective. Allo is phone # tied, like WhatsApp/Telegram. So definitely trying to go after a different market segment. It just failed.
Duo continues to be awesome. Being a FaceTime competitor that is cross-platform is great. No account needed, just simply start a video chat from your address book (or from the App).
Hangouts is... something special. There are clearly reasons things happened the way they did. But I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.
[+] [-] Eridrus|7 years ago|reply
Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.
Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.
[+] [-] jhanschoo|7 years ago|reply
Messaging: you have what you have now, Messages as a vanilla messaging app Allo and Duo as flavored products focusing on particular features for messaging.
Email: GMail as vanilla Inbox as a GTD-flavored that is having its most used features is being folded back into GMail.
[+] [-] arwineap|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] barrkel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenjan|7 years ago|reply
Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution.
If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now.
[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...
[1] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/
[+] [-] fencepost|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woogiewonka|7 years ago|reply
Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like.
I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.
[+] [-] ahartmetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hesarenu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] millstone|7 years ago|reply
Mild tweaks are great because they spare Leadership the pain of making hard decisions.
> And by refocusing on Messages and Duo for consumers and Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team collaboration
"Instead of working on five products, we're 'refocusing' down to four products." Right.
This has the stench of a post-faction justification that expertly avoids stepping on too many toes. IME Leadership gets axed by Senior Leadership not too long after.
[+] [-] dkhenry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|7 years ago|reply
I use Signal, but it's fine at best, but it's not really going to break out of it's niche.
[+] [-] 0xb100db1ade|7 years ago|reply
It's kind of like how Apple will combine security updates with stuff like new emojis: to increase the incentive for the general populus to update.
I sometimes compare Signal to iMessage, except it's cross-platform and private.
[+] [-] Markoff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joekrill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jknz|7 years ago|reply
Answer: Go to Gmail and send an email to the other party "can you Skype now?".
Literally. I had to schedule a video call recently by email. There is simply no formulation to schedule a video call using the name of one of google's products.
"Can you Hangout tomorrow?", "Can you Duo tomorrow", "Can you chat with Allo tomorrow?".
Nothing would work without confusing the other party with some probability. "Can you Skype tomorrow" always works, with everyone, no confusion.
[+] [-] tjoff|7 years ago|reply
Communicating with the people in our lives is one of the most important things we do every day, whether it’s chatting with friends about an upcoming trip, calling mom to check in, or touching base with colleagues.
So when I'm forced to move off hangouts for those connections that I still user over it - what do you think the chances are that I will choose a google product?
[+] [-] sorenjan|7 years ago|reply
Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.
[+] [-] Analemma_|7 years ago|reply
There’s something hilariously tragic about this being the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to deliver Google a coup-de-grace on messaging, and they can’t do it because they’re just as incompetent.
[+] [-] pavanagrawal123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shubidubi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] distant_hat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkarakk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidbird|7 years ago|reply
One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.
[+] [-] brendanmc6|7 years ago|reply
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 my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.
And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.
And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.
And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...
On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.
I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said.
What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)
EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
[+] [-] CivBase|7 years ago|reply
Why can't text and audio/video be supported in the same app? Skype, Hangouts, HipChat (RIP) and many other messaging programs have been doing it for ages. It's simple and intuitive.
The Hangouts Chat/Meet split is particularly confusing. Aside from supporting more people in a call, I really don't understand what makes a Meet call better than the old Hangouts calls. My confusion is only compounded by Google's continued support for calls on the old Hangouts (now "Hangouts Chat"?).
Is there really such a big difference between an enterprise chat service and a personal one? Companies were turning to Hangouts long before Google announced it would become an enterprise-focused service.
HipChat (RIP) and Slack have obvious enterprise features that would seem out-of-place in a personal chat app... but Hangouts doesn't have any such features. It became popular without them. Why change your development focus all of the sudden? Why not continue marching towards a unified communications app and let the enterprise customers just do their thing?
I'm sure, given proper context and information, most of the decisions leading up to this point make sense in isolation. Still, Google really needs to sit down and figure out where they want all these apps to be in 5 years because - though I'm far from the first (or last) to say it - this is a mess.
[+] [-] ericabiz|7 years ago|reply
Allo
Duo
Messages
Hangouts
Hangouts Chat
Hangouts Meet
I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up?
This is ridiculous.
[+] [-] shubidubi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ndnxhs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petecox|7 years ago|reply
e.g. Pidgin.
[+] [-] justinplouffe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenjan|7 years ago|reply
https://messages.android.com/
[+] [-] nyrulez|7 years ago|reply
If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.
[+] [-] a-dub|7 years ago|reply
I suppose that makes sense in today's upside down world.
[+] [-] shard972|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niftich|7 years ago|reply
This post seemed like it might cut the BS and explain what's going on, but it's tinged with PR platitudes and is unacceptably unclear and nonchalant about "classic" Hangouts' fate. They're basically saying they'll shut it down soon but not quite yet.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16886921
[+] [-] jdofaz|7 years ago|reply
Several years back the Android version of hangouts:
* could message over hangouts, google voice and sms/mms
* could merge those methods into a thread by person
* was a required vendor pre-install app, if you knew someone’s gmail address and they had android you could reliably send a hangouts message
* it was easy to video call people because most people had hangouts installed
Sure it wasn’t as user friendly as iMessage and FaceTime but the base was there and the ui could have improved to get there.