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Comment by hackaflocka | Hacker News Reader

If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you:

GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use.

Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText.

Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

So, what I would LOVE is something like GMail for texting... i.e., GText.

- Almost unlimited storage in the cloud so I can keep all my old texts.

- Access to all my texts via a web browser.

- Search through all my old texts with powerful Google Search.

- Never lose old texts just because I changed my phone.

- All the cool GMail features such as Labels and Filters, and colors for labels.

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You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0].

It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS, without a proxy!

Hopefully this small project will take off and eventually become bigger than Allo.

0. http://hangouts.google.com

Plus for the most part if people are still on gChat it uses that.

I have no idea why the cool parts of allo aren't just a feature of chats in Hangouts.

I use and love Hangouts for this exact reason. I haven't found anything that can do the IM+Voice+SMS combo crossplatform.

I don't get why Google isn't pressing Hangouts hard vs. letting it languish. It really should be a core product that ties everything together. Unified contacts, instant communications of all varieties, whether SMS, IM, voice, video...

Since it hasn't got an update in forever, the UI is crappy, and they've turned off all API access and denied people writing third party clients.

I now wish there was an alternative, but I haven't found anything that does it all.

Why, Google, Why!?!?

> It stores your texts in the cloud forever

It does? Are we talking about SMS here? Last time I checked Hangouts certainly did not sync SMS messages. A real shame because I miss that functionality sorely when switching between devices.

It does if you use Google Voice or Google Fi.

And you can use it in your browser!

Little known? You must be kidding. It has more than 1 Billion installations [0].

It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse.

The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account, needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat.

On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well).

As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though, we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations).

The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :)"

[0]: https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE

The parent comment was being sarcastic.

I just tried it out. Despite of using GMail for years, I didn't know Google had created hangouts.google.com. :-)

Just tried it out and to my disappointment, it doesn't allow me to send a file other than images to other users. Google engineers if you are listening please add the ability to send docs and files to other users!

Presumably this is because they don't want hangouts to become a de facto file sharing service, by the fact that the person you're messaging could be offline and you might expect the content to be archived/re-downloadable. The fact that pictures are shareable is (I think) because they do/can put the pictures into a google photos gallery.

What you probably want to do is put it in google drive and then share a link in hangouts.

(Not a googler)

It lacks integration with SMS though.

GText will integrate SMS and all in-house Google instant-messaging/texting modalities.

I use an app that backs up all my SMS/MMS onto Gmail (SMS Backup+). It labels them accordingly and separates them by contact. The downside is that MMS are put on a separate conversation and conversations are limited to 100 messages. But the import process puts them all neatly back onto the phone (except MMS). I don't often have to check for old emails so I don't re-import all the texts when I switch phones, the web interface suffices.

It also puts all calls as a calendar event (including length) and entry in the conversations. I find this feature very useful.

Not sure what's going on with your use of the iPhone.

Every iPhone user has an iCloud account which almost all are backing up to right now. So when you change phone you just need to do a Restore from iCloud and all of your messages will just be there. I would consider it pretty idiot proof.

For starters, iCloud has a 5GB limit (free tier). And that limit has been used up by lots of other things in addition to iMessages.

iCloud backups are also known to fail. Someone I know just can't get the backup to work on their iPhone.

Most of the drawbacks of iCloud have been totally overcome years ago, and 5Gb is totally sufficient since only personal data is backed up, media file (music,video,Apps) are not.

Go to the next Apple Store and enjoy a free unlimited in time support for theses issues.

Every time I came by a Genius Bar for support I have witness "dumbs" users crying tears of joy after an epic data recovery thanks to the dumb-proof iCloud backup (and that exactly why both my parents are backed up on iCloud, for some people "dumb-proofness" is more important than privacy concerns)

>And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

curious: How do you change phones? I have never lost any messages in iMessage when I was moving between phones.

Everything you just described is a complete privacy nightmare.

At this stage, I've given up caring about my privacy :-)

You can get your old texts via encrypted backup.

Apple doesn't store them server side. It's not a migration issue.

Which is why I wrote "idiot-proof". Things such as "encrypted backup" and "server side" are difficult to parse when I'm under the pressure of changing a phone. Plus, Apple has a bad enough reputation as it is (with cloud / syncing). I want my old texts to reappear magically without having to know these complicated sounding concepts. GMail does that. GText would if Google created it along similar lines.

It would be nice to have an option to move them between phones without relying on restoring the iTunes or iCloud backup of a previous device. I just got my new 7+ on Thursday and as with every new device I get I was keen to just start from a clean slate (my home screen on my 6+ was a mess and instead of cleaning it up I just decided it would be easier to start from square one, all my photos were already on my iCloud photo library and all my music on Apple Music) - annoyingly enough while a large chunk of my core experience was migrated over messages were not.

Now, considering iMessage uses E2E encryption and they don't store any of this data outside of your iCloud backup I'm not shocked, but considering I already get notified that iMessage was set up on another device and the public key is sent to Apple so new messages can be encrypted with it I don't see why my existing device couldn't just "catch-up" the new one like Skype used to do before they moved message history server-side.

> Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

Funny, cause Xiaomi has this working fine. I've changed device not long ago and it freaked me out a little.

Doesn't this basically exist in Google voice? I've been using it for 6+ years and it's a great (albeit free) service.

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