It's better than FaceTime because it works on Android. It's better than Skype and Google Hangouts because your cellphone number is your identity; you don't have to log in with any usernames or passwords. Extremely low friction.
Phone numbers are much harder to change , so if some annoying person gets a hold of it suddenly they can harass me across networks. This is a thing that actually happens! A big reason why I don't like telegram (even if everything else is awesome).
I'm cool with my account being linked to a phone number, but I'd rather avoid giving the phone number to people I want to talk to (instead handing out a network-specific username)
These people would be able to converse with you on Telegram but would not be able to find your phone number on the app/site.
Wire is a platform/client that allows setting up accounts with email address and/or phone number, although when I set it up I had to provide a phone number. Contact sharing is not perfect yet. It also has end-to-end encryption by default, has multi-device and multi-platform sync, and some other cool features (doodling, for example).
That said I'd like 2 user options on my phone more to separate work/personal so I can turn off one but not the other.
Changing your phone number and getting everyone who still has the old to change over can take years.
To ensure your emails actually arrive in GMail, the only sure way is using GMail yourself.
Otherwise, you’ll never be able to be sure they arrive.
That’s like every ISP only allowing people from the same ISP to call them, and then increasing the cost to creating a new phone number.
Sure, now you prevent spam calls, but you also make phones unusable.
I suddenly got hit with a flurry of spam calls today which furthers my distaste for giving out a phone number. If only giving out free limited use phone numbers was a thing.
For contacts it just uses the system address book.
The market is incredibly saturated in the chat space. Google keeps creating new things with new names (which they will eventually kill off) and the rest of the market is just completely saturated. WeChat, WhatsApp, Skype, FaceTime, Messenger, SnapChat, HangOuts; and that's the short list. It's getting out of hand.
The chat model is incredibly difficult to monetize too. None that don't have other vertical product lines have shown an ability to properly monetize in a way to turn a profit. Eventually that will matter, but for now money grows on trees in the Valley so no one cares.
I almost feel like the sort of joke that "we can't just keep selling each other insurance" as a criticism of the of banking sector could easily be rewritten with chat apps and the Valley.
I wonder what the long term vision is. More data harvesting for advertising? Become the de facto platform for services offered through your chat network? The latter reminds of how every company needed a presence in Second Life to engage with customers and leads…
I expect similar use cases to exist around the country.
The phone number as ID is huge for the non superuser crowd. This is part of the reason why LINE took off in Japan.
Google had said something about Google Duo being bandwidth friendly and good for slow connections but FB Messenger is miles ahead, at least in my usage. Which left me quite disappointed with Duo, as I like the idea of using Duo over FB.
But then I recall we had working video chat a decade ago with only a few hundred Kbps...
This! Even in appear.in, which is one of the most stable, I encounter connection problems almost daily.
Is it because all these new apps have to go through the browser stack?
So I'm still not convinced.
It is usually lack of bandwidth or major packet loss that cause trouble.
I much prefer Facebook Messenger where its about the contact, and u call/msg/video them and its all there in one stream.
Google's disjointed approach to messaging/calling doesn't make sense to me or my non-techie friends.
I spent almost half a decade at Google, and I _know_ that their product people are fairly competent, but the company is so badly run on the product side (in terms of incentives, etc) that product at Google has the emergent property of being extremely, extremely bad at what they do.
For apps that rely on network effects, pure feature competition isn't the only (or sadly, even the most) relevant factor. I commented on this in the Duo announcement thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12295847), but the gist was something like:
With GChat, they squandered a massive, decade-early networks effect advantage with ten years of inexplicably idiotic product decisions, rebranding, failure to adequately replace deprecated products, etc. I actually generally consider them to have the absolute best products in terms of feature quality, far more often than not; Yet at this point, I can't imagine why anyone would see a Google product that relies on network effects at all and not run as far away as fast as possible.
Perhaps it doesn't have the features of Hangouts while it does have the requirement that you install another app and the stigma of it being a Google product (i.e. they collect all your info). Also lacks messaging capabilities.
It can only be used for very short 1 on 1 phone calls since I can't imagine video chatting for a long time from a phone. Also it can't be used with a desktop.
Otherwise, Skype and Hangouts are way better plus any decent WebRTC P2P chat like www.appear.in
I'm semi-actively looking for alternatives to Skype and hadn't heard of Duo.
I've an Android phone, they jam in so much junk I don't need, surprised not have had a notification of a Google communication app.
Personally I feel the space needs to be democratised badly. We need some way to take control of contacts lists so they can be locally (to the user) synced outside of any app and have a protocol like XMPP that's common across carriers so that [video] chat clients become like PSTN telephones.
At least put the speakerphone on so we can hear both sides of the conversation.
I suspect the "video preview" feature will come soon to Facebook Messenger, which has been developing quickly.
[0]: http://lifehacker.com/you-can-now-use-facebook-messenger-wit...