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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

My lord, why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3? They had an established userbase, a name, a brand, and useful cross-platform tools already.

I get the desire to start fresh, but that's a lot of established traction in a very crowded market to just throw away.

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> why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3?

I was wondering that too. I honestly suspect some executive in Google's team wanted to have more visibility, team and power.

Resume Driven Development

oh I thought this was some new Hangouts interface, but it's not is it?

So...Google Buzz.

If they want something really innovative, bring back open standards and a federated IM protocol. We went from AIM/Yahoo/MSN to XMPP .. and back to Google/FB. It feels like a regression.

XMPP was just to crack the egg. They had to dangle a big enough carrot to get users to switch. They knew once they had them switched that it would be VERY unlikely users would go back. So... lockdown! And they were right, how many people have switched back to AOL/MSN/Yahoo? I know I haven't.

I switched to FB Messenger because it's on mobile and desktop, and everyone I talk to is there. If MSN wasn't dead I'd probably still be using that.

Edit: Oh and more recently Discord has taken over my friend group's urge to talk with voices.

If only FB would release a proper desktop client for their messaging services. They could own that space.

I use messenger.com more often than I use Facebook at this point. I know it's not technically a desktop app but you could probably set up a shortcut with something like (assuming chrome. Don't know if FF has the same feature)

"path\to\chrome\chrome.exe" --app=https://www.messenger.com

Edit: Actually testing that, that's actually pretty neat. I'm going to do that when I get home!

I use franz http://meetfranz.com/ specifically for that purpose

Exactly. Hangouts has a lot of problems - its performance doesn't impress me, and the UI is confusing in a lot of ways, and splitting SMS/Conversations is something that really disappointed me, but still - it has the full featureset. I mean obviously, it suffers from the fact that it's heavily tied to Google accounts, which isn't ideal for trying to reach outside of the Google sphere. But otherwise, it does everything.

So why doesn't it get more love from Google?

Performance? Just how fast do you type, anyway?

UI? I write things, and they appear in front of someone else. Even my technophobe mom has no problems with it.

Tied to Google... well, yeah. But you kind of need some kind of 'account' for chat apps.

I remember when 'Whatsapp' came out and people mentioned that it didn't have a web interface. I won't use anything that I can't type into when I'm at a computer - pulling out my phone and t-y-p-i-n-g out a message is just a non-starter.

Hangouts is very sluggish. Messages are also delayed on it sometimes.

I think it helps to define what we are talking about. "Hangouts" can be the system overall, the web interface (and which one, Inbox, Gmail or video chat?), or the mobile phone app, of which it may behavior differently on the different phone OSs. Hangouts is usually very timely and responsive for me when using Inbox or Gmail. The Android app is slow and annoying. I've never used the iOS app.

> Performance? Just how fast do you type, anyway?

The UI lags hard for me during common operations, such as opening the app, and sending messages; often there's a several second lag between pressing the send button, the entry field blanking, and the message finally showing up in the conversation w/ UI indicating that it's in the process of being sent.

And occasionally, yes, I out-type the app & phone's ability to process keyboard input. My phone is a bit old, but that seems like an excuse more than anything; I don't really understand why it's so hard for a device w/ a processor that measures its speed in GHz and RAM measured in GB to keep up with a single app whose job is to send text messages.

But alas, the phone world's opinion is that I should upgrade to the latest and greatest $400-$600 phone every 18 months.

Weird. I have a Nexus 4, which is several years old at this point, and hangouts runs fine on it. Maybe because the OS itself is fairly up to date?

I have a Nexus 5 running the latest Android (excluding N) and have exactly the same problems the commenter above you describes.

Not only that, but when I've explained these issues to my friends they respond with the same response you gave, down to the 'weird.'

Hangouts crashes all the time on my Nexus 6P. Video calls are buggy and any interaction with photos is extremely sluggish. This has been going on for months and months.

And the name is stupid. When I used to encourage people to use Hangouts, I always had to explain the name. Talk is a great name and they should have gone back to it for Allo.

Not a full feature set - can't share contacts, one of the things that made me switch away

Oof yes, I have noticed that one a couple of times. And it would be nice to be able to send messages and video chat between individual devices that I own (all my kids' tablets are on my account), but I suppose that's out-of-scope.

  > why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3

Ghost of Emu in the machine [0][1]

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/22/emus-android-texting-app-m... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/google-acquires-emu-an-im-...

> They had an established userbase, a name, a brand

While I agree with first two, Hangouts was a terrible brand with a bad rep on UX (too slow on Android, complex UI etc), it was kind of like Google's Internet Explorer. They had to get rid of the brand for consumers at least especially younger ones that are the prime target (the Snapchat generation if I may say). I agree though that Hangouts has a better reputation with the corporate world even though Slack is kind of eating their lunch minus the video part where they're still king I think.

They had talk, voice, buzz, hangouts ... have a messenger app ... now 2 more ... all of them incomplete, slow, confusing, ugly ... it's amazing how, with the immense budget they have and with so many smart people , they cannot come up with something decent

These 2 new apps are destined to fail

I still use hangouts cause it's linked with Gmail ... but I hate it cause it's slow and unreliable

Apparently Google plans to focus Hangouts on enterprise/business customers.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focu...

That is what I think also.

One possible explanation: internally Google eats their own dog food. When I was a contractor there, everything ran on gmail, gooogle docs, and hangouts. Perhaps they wanted something better for internal use, and now we get to use it also?

> My lord, why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3?

The same reason Duo isn't.

Both are substantial departures from what Hangouts was, with some overlap, and calling either Hangouts would create incorrect expectations.

> why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3?

From what I've read Allo will become the casual messaging app, and Hangouts for work. Google probably wants to compete with Slack and similar offers.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point Google allows Allo and Hangouts to communicate.

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