Dear Google,
Please make one amazing chat app. Just one. Merge Allo, Duo, Chat, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Voice, and your RCS platform into one extensible platform with third party integrations.
The comments in this thread? They are not flattering. It is not a sign of joy that people comment on Google releasing a new chat app, or confusing your branding even further.
Here's a quick question: I have a friend on Android, I have an iPhone, how do I message them? What's your best solution. What if I want to switch from messaging to voice? What if I want to make a video call? What if I want to invite a third person? iPhones make it easy to transition between different types of communication, and provide useful SMS sync to computers.
Slack, Microsoft's Teams, and surprisingly Discord, are all moving in the direction of being a single hub for communication. Admittedly, Slack and Teams don't make it easy (yet) to message people outside your organization. Discord does, and they're beating you to the punch, quelle surprise. All of the above platforms are easy to set up on the web and smartphones.
So please, please stop this proliferation. Stop footgunning yourselves on messaging platforms. Build one, make it amazing, and devote resources to making it work for users and organizations.
But hey, connectivity is just a section of productivity, and docs, slides, sheets, drive is all productivity, so add it all to the same app, as well as google plus. You also use the app store to get your company's apps, so add the play store as well.
Finding the destination for a business meeting is also productivity, so add maps inside it as well, and translate, since you might be running meetings and emails in different languages, plus keep for note-taking, calendar, my business, contacts, forms, groups, etc.
Congrats, you just designed Lotus Notes.
Or Android.
Integrating different use cases is different from interoperability. For example, make it easy to share a file on drive via email and chat does not require drive to be integrated. Likewise meet (new contacts, social net) vs chat (known contacts, rooms) might be a good split if they interact nicely together.
Splitting chat from email is a stretch, much like with voice from text or from video. Or simple images.
What Google is doing is create apps that do not work together with each other.
I've found most people tend to see email as the "slow/deliberate" electronic communication, and IM/Messages/SMS as the "fast/extemporaneous", so even conflating GMail doesn't really make sense (why do you think Wave failed?).
We don't want one app which does literally everything, just one app for all our mobile communications: primarily SMS and video calling these days.
For example, it'd be very useful if you could collaboratively edit a document in a chat app. So should your uber chat app swallow Google Docs too? That would be a beast, and the HN would scream.
No, you make a bunch of smaller apps that embed, interoperate and integrate.
And once you've built a bunch of integration points for your own apps, then you document them and make them available to third parties. Voila first-class fully dog-fooded integration points rather than third party integrations being distinctly second class citizens.
Install hangouts on the iphone. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
Or you can have your friend install iMessage on the android. Wait apple doesn't port it's apps to android? I'm stunned.
I think one party or other will always have to maintain an additional app to support that use case. I have a group chat with a few friends who have flitted between Android and iOS and the group has continued seamlessly for years.
I'm not sure if there's a reason to go Hangouts over Whatsapp, other than both parties having to maintain an additional app
We've all heard that many times before and with so many other apps duplicating Hangouts functionality I wouldn't be so confident.
But then how will their under utilized engineers get a promotion?
First I stopped using Google+ (I mean: it isn't any good). Then over time I stopped logging Adium into Google Talk, because fewer and fewer people I know use it. I never started using Allo or Duo.
They had already decided the first X characters of my handle (FirstnameLastname______) and then I had to add something to it. And not at all any of the usernames I wanted were taken. Some are still not taken. I realised this worthless piece of software/service isn't worth the time and Google has been proving it since then.
I tested Allo and Duo the day it was released. That's it. Work has GSuite so have to use Hangouts.
Joining servers is very easy, creating servers - they are perhaps inaccurately named - is instantaneous, and each server can contain groups, voice and text channels. Adding friends is easy, and from the friends menu it's easy to message or begin a call with anyone and create ad hoc group chats and calls.
Perhaps your belief that they are entirely different problems and necessitate different solutions is based in the fact that they the market has thus far assumed that to be true.
all of us who heavily invested in Wave are laughing so hard we are coughing up blood.
I never used iMessage so I don't know how it compares, but this has always worked well for me.
Our company is evaluating team collaboration products right now. I told them not to even look at hangouts because you couldn't trust Google to keep a product alive. This was two days ago...
- https://meet.jit.si as a hangout replacement (seems like a polished hangout alternative)
- https://about.mattermost.com/ as a on-premise slack / hipchat / irc alternative
(not affiliated with any of those products)
> It’s a full rewrite of the Hangouts meeting experience and will work without any plug-ins (and Google also promises that it will be lighter on the processor, too, and won’t eat into your battery life or make your laptop’s fans spin at full speed). The team also cut down on the code size and promises that meetings will load “instantly.”
Our team spans macOS, Windows, and Linux and each one of us has our own unique bugs with Hangouts ranging from robotic voices to not being able to join existing Hangouts. In short it's a giant mess. I'm glad to see they're starting from scratch, hopefully this time around will be more reliable.
> To join this meeting, install the latest version of Google Chrome.
I guess no more meetings for me then...
Google Voice languished, with message forwarding sometimes taking many minutes or even a few hours. Then this year, a new Voice push of some sort was announced, and now message forwarding is mostly back to nearly instantaneous.
One fucking product, Google. That works. Fine, add new functionality to it, but don't make me keep chasing down and and installing new apps, wondering whether and how this integrates with what I already have and what is going to get hosed. (By the way, do you guys ever try to use your public help pages, yourself? Hahaha...)
So, that little sidebar in Gmail? I'll still use that, when it happens to work and to be convenient. I recently used Hangouts -- setting up an entire account under my domain for the other party -- in a case where Skype had proved to be crap in terms of quality and holding the connection (what they typically use, and what I've refused to use since moving to a new machine).
That's about it, for my current Google IM-ish experience.
Gmail, I use. Calendar, I use. Docs, I use. They change -- I can keep up with this.
Pick a name, and a front door, and leave that the fuck alone. Your schizophrenic branding -- and sometimes dueling functionality -- is not doing you any good, here.
Cheers.
Google does not have a good track record when it comes to supporting their products. Look at Picasa, Google Glass, Bump, Currents, and sadly, Google Reader.
Google is good at advertising, email, and search. But I would not put any investment of time or data into their other products if I knew I needed them in the future.
Sorry Google, your search is great, your email services easy to use, but everything from your Apps for business panel through to your plethora of half-baked products are messy and inaccessible.
Google hangouts (which I use for sms, among other things) has a very poor search feature. Slack on the other hand has decent search capabilities. Plus, slack-bots are well integrated already. It does not avoid my largest criticism of slack: the inability to save conversation history locally.
This sounds like a late to market slack-clone. What is innovative about this offering?
Screenshot from TC: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/664cd61...
Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks that a search function seems absolutely basic for a messaging app.
Hangouts was/is amazing for conf calls, so they took that, made it simpler and called it Meet. Hangouts was less awesome for chat, but a lot of people are using it and Slack, so they took the good things from Slack, revamped the chat experience and called it Chat.
Their intro explainer has quotes from people in large corporations saying how good it is and scenarios of these products being used for "work things."
I like this and hope that it rises in prominence.
That said, I'm having trouble not laughing out loud at this whole thing. It legitimately feels to me like they have no clue what they're doing and are spinning their wheels so that they have wheels to spin.
* Gmail
* Google Talk
* Google Voice
* Allo
* Duo
* Hangouts Chat
* Hangouts Meet
Am I missing any products that compete with their own other products?
I get the idea of internally challenging yourselves to come up with replacements for your products but at least have some clear focus. Why are there so many different ways for me to connect with people when using Google's platform?
The beauty of iMessage at least in the mobile space is that it's your single app for text communications and Facetime for video. That's it. Bonus if you have a Mac since you can use it from your computer as well.
But I'm happy they do not forget the enterprise... using hangouts nearly every day with slack and /hangout . Still the best quality when you have a global team and sometimes flacky internet or below 300 Kbit/s bandwidth.
I can't imagine it will be free. Not that I suggest it should be.
edit: Nope. https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
You can only communicate using the letter matching the app you're using.
For these use cases restricting Hangouts Meet to gsuite customers means Hangouts is dead for them. I guess most people will switch to videoconferencing with Skype+OBS and streaming live to Twitch. It will work but it's harder to set up for non technical people.
Of course google does not owe me nothing and they can do as they like with their (until now) free product. But it's a pity that these common use cases that were possible with Hangouts are going to be discontinued.
Advantage slack has is integration with different things and you can use any email address to sign up.
if Chat and meet required to sign in with only Gmail then people may not want to get locked in
It's such a bad running joke internally that we have a never-ending multiplication of chat apps that I had to check the calendar to see if today was suddenly April.
Maybe their plan is... if we make Hangouts worse, than we can make them use Allo and Duo. I know 0 people using those two apps. Even people with Pixel phones are not using it.
Duo
Chat
Meet
Voice
--
Did I miss any?
Zoom provides 50-person.
No delete or edit?
Useless.
Which is basically what I end up thinking after virtually every Google announcement regarding chat.
Sometimes snark is the only decent response to a situation; I think that Google's chat quagmire is arguably one of those.
