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Comment by karma_vaccum123 | Hacker News Reader

I know these will be preinstalled on Android, but many friends and family use iOS and I will feel silly asking them to install Duo and Allo.

Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. Why start requiring separate apps?

This is Google at its dumbest. They are squandering the small amount of momentum Hangouts has.

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Google's communications strategy has been bafflingly dumb for years and years now. Almost my ENTIRE social network (that was on chat; this was before every part of society was "on the Internet") used to be on Gchat. That's a massive network-effects advantage that they had ages before anyone else did (including Facebook, but Facebook's network did surpass them with the ability to find someone by their face).

Almost a decade of inexplicably stupid product decisions later, they've squandered their hugely valuable lead (and then some). I can't imagine why anyone would go out of their way to use any Google product whose usefulness is at all dependent on network effects (I've completely ignored the launch of Allo and Duo and, years after everyone else, have pretty much moved to FB Messenger as my primary messaging app). This is a pretty chronic Google problem that I noticed both from the inside and outside: their engineering and design talent are incredible, but the people responsible for the product and marketing side are evidently really, really bad at what they do.

This is part of why products like GMail or Google Search do so well, and products like G+ so poorly: you could be the only person in the world using GMail and it would be just as useful (and well-designed), while the quality of products like G+ depend less on their quality _per se_ and more on network effects, which Google's product/marketing is clearly too incompetent to do well.

Also, Google Search and Gmail were REALLY GOOD back when Google made really good products, and they both seem to be treated as sacred there. Neither has received truly radical changes to fit with Google's new and often transient business focuses. Had Google made the mistake of replacing Gmail with Inbox, Gmail would've gone the way of everything else Google's done lately. But it seems like someone rightfully has ensured the two "big ones" stay largely unmolested.

If anything, both Google Search and Gmail have received negative changes.

I've been using DDG for years, though I'll return to Google Web search periodically (Books and Scholar I use more often). It's nagware that's begging me to make it my default browser (no, you blew through that trust relation ages ago, sweetheart), and long before then stopped providing actual usable URL links in favour of its craptacular redirects. On desktop I've got a demungifier script I can run those through, on Android, if I see those, I remember why I don't use Google Web search, abandon it, and return to DDG.

Google News, in a moment of major irony, fails to work at all on Chrome/Android.

The company lost its soul a long time ago. It's been losing its mind for some years now.

Basic HTML Gmail (yes, the one that loads the entire page again for almost any action) is so much faster than AJAXified Gmail (let alone Inbox) that it's worth a couple missing features to use it instead, IMO.

Which is incredibly stupid since maybe the biggest original selling point of AJAX was "it's faster because you don't have to reload the whole page".

And of course the memory use is way, way lower. Especially than Inbox, which is a resource hog.

IMO most google products have been getting steadily worse since ~2008/09. Including things like Youtube.

Inbox is actually great but it's definitely not a replacement for Gmail. It's a very different concept IMO

It was intended to replace Gmail, until Google found out even Googlers hated it.

> The Gmail team did not have to wait for the reaction for long. And it wasn’t very “googly.” It caused an uproar teeming with disgust for just about every decision the Gmail product/design team made. Phrases like, “You guys just completely destroyed Gmail!” and “What are these crazy designers doing over there?!” were everywhere. From being spoken at many of Google’s cafes to every internal online forum.[0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/16/why-did-google-decide-to-s...

Yeah I remember early years gchat all my social network was using that for chatting, because you always had the email open anyway when on a browser and a chat right there was just too convenient.

Also, centralized chat history! Very few did that at the time and most had massive issues with unread tracking.

The moment I went on mobile and tried hangout it was dead to me. Read notification duplicates, phantom notifications for read messages, long startup times, and group everything came mich much later

Everyone jumped ship at that moment. The hangout app was THAT bad early years, and even after quite some time later real usability issues were never fixed.

> This is a pretty chronic Google problem that I noticed both from the inside and outside: their engineering and design talent are incredible, but the people responsible for the product and marketing side are evidently really, really bad at what they do.

See, I don't even think it's marketing, it's Google not understanding what they already have and engineering a solution without a problem. Hangouts as an app on mobile is okay - I have qualms, but it works well enough. Hangouts on Desktop though is horrible, and it's integration into Gmail is frustrating at best (it took them a long time to get something as simple as status messages back to Hangouts after the switch). I get the impression Google saw what was happening with Slack and wanted Hangouts to be that (and also a successor to Wave); a persistent "better than email" communication method with every bell and whistle you could want for communication. But since Hangouts was released, they've removed the few fun social features, removed hangout plugins, and just took what was feature-rich and dumbed it down to the point where I wonder why I should have an entire separate page open dedicated to hangouts when even Skype is a more graceful solution with more functionality.

I really liked gChat when it was small and out of the way. I won't make the claim "everyone used it", but we certainly enjoyed in our GAFE environment as it was an appropriate intermediate between email and phone call.

Duo makes me ask the same question now - why do I want this as opposed to just Hangouts, unless video is going to be removed from Hangouts or only Duo is going to get improved performance updates. This seems like it could easily be a hangouts update instead of a standalone application, and Hangouts is already available cross-platform on iOS and Android, or via any modern web-browser.

Oh yes, Googles insistence to the horrible Chrome plugin (and ONLY chrome plugin, you're SoL if you want to use any other browser) instead of a slim desktop app like iMessage/Telegram is pretty much the reason why I've abandoned Hangouts.

I don't use a chrome plugin, hangouts works great inside gmail which I always keep open, or from https://hangouts.google.com/.

I mean, it's missing features like searching by name (there's a workaround by going to calls, putting in the name, and choosing SMS) and other things, but it's worth it to be able to type and copy paste texts.

You're aware Hangouts has a firefox plugin too right?

And there's hangouts.google.com if you just want to hit it on a web page...

How did I never know about this. How long has it existed?

Google is terrible at marketing what they have.

Not for 64-bit it doesn't.

This blogpost is probably the only marketing that'll happen.

>Hangouts on Desktop though is horrible

Can you please elaborate on why you think so? I feel the exact opposite I guess. Maybe it is because it was horrible before and I', using a newer version?

It is one of the most unobtrusive and great apps I've used. It sits in the corner of my screen[0] and I have no problems at all even when I'm chatting (texting too! Google Voice!) with someone[1].

[0]:https://imgur.com/a/szw0C [1]:https://imgur.com/a/g0VsZ

I use hangouts on a daily basis for our remote team and also found the desktop app to be terrible to the point of avoidance when doing video calls.

Many times at least one person invited via desktop app doesn't receive the invite, but do receive if we send via gmail.

Confusing UI, lack of error messages, and several major UI bugs (press button, nothing happens) have been cause for hours of accumulated wasted time.

I'm glad you'be had a better experience. It's been very unreliable for us.

Oh. I guess I don't experience those a lot because I use it for texting and the occasional phone call, but do see some problems which I ignore because they're rare in my use case.

Their "Google groupthink ethos bubble" has become their biggest enemy. This comes apparent specially in social products and desktop client support.

The people designing Google products just do not understand human interaction. Excuse the Gawker network link, but I think this reaction to a past Google keynote hits the nail on the head.

http://gizmodo.com/5921823/does-google-have-any-social-skill...

yep, that piece hits it right on the head.

My analysis is far more cynical.

People (especially product managers and designers) don't get promoted at big software companies for incrementally and carefully improving on some existing thing.

Novelty and churn pays off in the internal promo economy of a large company. Steady at the oars does not.

Oh absolutely. Like I said, I worked at Google, and I certainly don't think all the product people I knew were personally incompetent.

I was using the term more generally to refer to "the way Google runs product and marketing (including the incentive structure)". Though part of this does bleed over into engineering: One of the reasons I quit the company was because promotion had become so far removed from quality of work that I was starting to feel compelled to spend too much of my time thinking about what the promotion rubric might think of my work vs what was actually good for the project.

This is an important point and echoes my experience as well. After shuffling around all the Google chat apps, almost my entire network is now just using Facebook.

Great job Google.

Exactly. Any other company would kill to have the massive amount of chances they had to be _the_ communications network. Most of the current winners (WhatsApp, snapchat, Facebook) probably could've done it with a fraction of the opportunities Google had. But instead we got literally a decade of them making seemingly arbitrary choices about their messaging products to the point that my prior has made a 180 degree turn: a messaging product coming out of Google is to be avoided like the plague, not preferred.

My usual bias is towards giving companies a pretty huge benefit of the doubt, since these problems are usually very difficult to get right. There's just so, so much data here (from inside and outside the company) to suggest that this was actually pure incompetence.

> Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine.

For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.

So why can't it be fixed?

At least it doesn't only run on Apple devices, like the complete joke that is FaceTime.

[Here lies a substantive question that was posed to a content-free comment. Edit lasts longer than delete, so you now get to read its depressingly gray tombstone. Let's reflect together on this.]

That's a very strong defense of a piece of software that deliberately prevents you from communicating with people that haven't bought the same piece of electronics.

Think on that for a moment - "Sorry grandmama, I can't send you iMessage or talk to you in person since you didn't spend your pension on an expensive Apple device."

For something as fundamental as human-to-human communication, closed, single vendor, protocols and systems deserve every criticism (and yes, Google deserves it as well).

In theory...in reality when it comes to Apple HN crowd has double standards (eg. see snarky comment on "closing date" at top and try to imagine such a comment on Apple not being downvoted here)

When it comes to shitty interoperability, Google takes the cake.

No one ever claimed FaceTime works on your android. They wanted to open source it and got fucked on patents.

Try using gmail to send a regular iCalendar format invite to an event. If they just happen to have used that email for a google account, fuck you it ends up in the Google calendar account they likely didn't know they even had, and never goes to their email.

THAT is unexpected, and arguably deceptive behaviour.

Is there any more info on trying to open source FaceTime? I've never heard of this before and seems interesting.

Jobs said it at the keynote when FaceTime was announced. They never managed to follow through, and ultimately had to change the way FaceTime works, because of a lawsuit by a patent troll.

Apple, richest company on the world, couldn't pay for a patent on their chat protocol to make it open? :/

But they did do the work to circumvent the patent. "Patents" can't logically be the reason FaceTime isn't an open standard today. I doubt they ever were. Apple simply realized that FaceTime was an effective sales driver for iOS hardware and wanted to keep that competitive advantage more than they wanted to follow through on Jobs's promise.

The patents forced them to route through their own servers instead of peer to peer. Seems like a logical reason not to make that an open standard to me.

Couldn't they have made it an open standard and required an account with them to communicate with their users? An open standard would have resulted in cross-platform clients.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I've read that they actively shutdown or circumvent projects to create other clients. If they really didn't consider it a strategic asset to push people to iOS I doubt they'd bother with that.

I think there are plausible reasons that could have changed their plans for them. Who knows if they would have actually followed through with the original plan or what their true reasons are. I don't know. That they changed their implementation to relay all video through their servers is known. They said so in court.

I guess they could be saying that they don't want to run servers for competitors to connect to, but under patent law, there's clearly nothing preventing them from doing so.

You'll need to explain that, I genuinely don't know what you say it.

Facetime is just a feature. It's a calling option in contacts and any phone call to another iPhone can be turned into a facetime call at the push of a button. That means you don't even need to think about it. There's no install process, no configuration, no account to set up, it's just there.

Furthermore because it can rely on guaranteed hardware features it has the best compression, bandwidth utilization and image quality in the business. If it's a joke, I'm not sure who it is that's doing the laughing.

there is an account and you do need to be signed into it in settings. if you don't sign in when you setup the phone, you separately need to sign into: app store, icloud, imessage, facetime, etc

It is a service, I don't see why it being integrated into some other app should matter.

It works for calling people who bought from the same brand as you, it doesn't work for the rest of people, and it pretends to work (WTF?) for people who used to have the same brand as you.

That's a very different bar from just needing to install an application.

I only started using Hangouts a few months ago, and find the macOS experience acceptable and think the iOS implementation is dead on.

I started using it lot more in the past year, mainly since it hits every platform my kids, parents, and ex use. Which is all of them, at any given moment. Being the family techie, I was the only one to note that we were virtually limited to 1 or 2 choices.

Hangouts has always worked a lot better for me than Skype and Facebook video chat. Both on Android and desktop.

Doesn't it use VP9? Tends to kill hardware acceleration, so very battery draining.

But aside from that it has generally been way more reliable for me too.

Same here, hangouts is one of best working solutions for me and my family on variety of devices and operating systems.

i think it's more that skype and facetime are amazing

The fact that it needs a browser plugin in order for the video/voice features to work doesn't help either.

Worse, now I have to find my friends' phone numbers. Is this targeted to people in developing countries who use apps like WhatsApp? Those people don't have fast enough mobile internet to make video calling work.

WhatsApp is not specially an emerging market product, I think it is the most popular chat app in a bunch of European countries.

Yea I think the US is definitely an outlier there; Out of the couple dozen countries I've visited recently outside of the US, Whatsapp seems like hands-down the most popular messaging app (whereas in the US, almost no one I know uses it unless they're in frequent contact with a non-trivial number of foreigners).

A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium. In lots of other countries you pay several cents for each individual text message and MMS cost several tens of cents. And this is for domestic messages. With international messages (which you often use because you're country is likely to be much smaller than the US) the costs are often insane and can reach more than a dollar per message. Basically providers in those countries stopped competing with apps like Whatsapp. They still offer a texting service, but they're not trying to get someone to use it, because they already lost the battle.

SMS' can be free in a lot of European countries, the main difference is that MMS didn't really take off in Europe as much as it did in the US so they usually cost more. Also since people weren't that attached to MMS, it was easy to 'replace'

For most of the 2000's MMS didn't work until you went into settings and entered an MMS gateway address or something. Which nobody did since they never used MMS anyway.

At least here in the UK SMS' are usually free (or very cheap) but whatsapp is popular since it's very easy to use, allows group chats/voice messages and works well when the connection isn't great. But mostly because it works on virtually every platform (even some feature phones), so you can assume that basically everyone has it.

> A major difference is that in the US text messages and MMS are usually free, so there's not a lot of pressure to move to a different communication medium.

I'm not sure that's true. At least in my sample, there are quite a few people who explicitly ask you to use some chat app instead of texting them, because they don't pay for unlimited texting.

I think a big reason for this is that in Europe people frequently move between countries, eg for school or work or vacation. This often means changing SIM cards and local phone number.

So it makes sense to use whatsapp because it's data based and you can keep the same account across SIM card changes.

That's actually a bug-feature: whatsapp is supposed to be tied to a phonenumber.

For example, take this use case: you have whatsapp with a german number. You go to italy. You get an italian sim. You get a new phone. Result: you can not use your german whatsapp. There is no way you can activate your german whatsapp account without yout german sim.

That's why you keep your original sim around (receiving an sms from abroad isn't very expensive and that's enough for re activating your account). And you can transfer your account to a different number as well.

Yeah haha - the concept of people not using WhatsApp is as alien to me as people who use WhatsApp is alien to the parent comment.

In the last 4/5 years, the only time I've met people not on WhatsApp were Chinese (WeChat) or Korean (Kakao) so basically. Amongst people I've just met it's pretty common to go straight to WhatsApp now when "adding" each other

WhatsApp does not run on tablets and I only have a tablet. I make calls on it and everything. Just can run WhatsApp.

I think the Russians are heavy Viber users.

> I think it is the most popular chat app ...

I'd say that it's also commonly used as a photo/video/file sharing tool.

The one thing I hate about hangouts and I could never figure out how to change was when searching for someone to text. It would search googles list of people with google+ and not my contact list first. Random people I don't even know named Mark, for example, would show up for me to text.

Still makes no sense to me.

I'm on iOS.

This is the most infuriating thing...now I just go through my contacts to find who I want to message (since their number exists but selecting SMS still brings up "On Hangouts")

Haven't used an iPhone in over a year but isn't this the same on iOS with Facetime and iMessage? One for video calls one for text messages?

Ignoring that I probably won't use this (no fan of of that company), if it doesn't require a weird setup it might be more accessible than Hangouts.

At least last time I checked Hangouts required you to join G+ first? Is that still the case?

No, Hangouts doesn't require G+. You can use it via Android or https://hangouts.google.com/ without joining G+.

Duo only requires phone number (and that you periodically send your contacts to Google)

Allo I think will be the same - they're transitioning to phone # based auth instead of Google account auth so that using a Google account is not a limiting factor.

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