So that's lovely, though overall the PMs and VPs need to reconcile all the apps with each other. A friend recently bought a Pixel Phone and was lost as to what to use. I mean, I can't blame him...
* Phone's generic looking SMS app
* Hangouts
* Voice
* Allo
* Duo
They killed Google Talk, ignored Google Voice, abandoning Hangouts, and their new apps are wastelands. Throw in the Wave, Buzz, and Plus projects, and it's astonishing just how massively Google is screwing up.
- Duo : here is an app in order to make video calls. I am ok to have a different icon on my launcher for this specific task. Especially since it comes with great perfs. I just miss a camera icon in places like the contacts app allowing to call the person with either Duo or another equivalent video call app (skype)
- Spaces : ok it is not going to work out but I can see this kind of semi public topical conversations as an usecase needing its own app.
- SMS Hangouts Allo -> this is where I have an issue. Anecdote : my mom calls SMS 'mails'. Casual users have a hard time following the different ways to send a text. And it is not their fault. all these apps serve the same purpose : send texts. I hope that some day we will have a single app in order to do it.
Yep, it is a mess.
I don't mind seeing a company attack a problem from multiple angles, but for messaging that's a big issue.
How do I send a text? Messenger.
How do I make a call? Messenger.
How do I make a video call? Messenger.
Try answering the same question using Google's services.
Hangouts on my Nexus 6 has the same options.
Imgur link to screenshot -> http://imgur.com/a/vTlqO
This has understandably led to no end of confusion among Fi/Voice users, including myself. [2][3][4][5]
[0] http://www.techtimes.com/articles/128591/20160129/google-ret...
[1] https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6062495?p=fi_tips&rd=1&...
[2] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/project-fi/eg...
[3] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/project-fi/04...
[4] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/hangouts/AcKr...
[5] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/project-fi/cB...
Google's suggested solution, besides twiddling cellular network settings and asking your friends to keep texting you until it works, is to stop using Hangouts [1].
[1] https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/6318464?hl=en
The Pixel pushes you to use Allo which is based on phone numbers and your phone's contact list, not your Google account contacts. If I want to message someone on Hangouts but I only know their email address (which pops up helpfully if I have corresponded with this person in Gmail), no problem. You can't do that in Allo - the people you message are identified by their phone number, not the fact that they have a Google account. In fact, you can't use Allo until you register your own number. So what is Allo? Is it SMS? Hangouts could already handle SMS and Google also released Messenger intending it to be your phone's default SMS client. The only entity you can message in Allo that doesn't need a phone number is Google Assistant, which isn't that great. If Allo requires you to be identified by a phone number, how is it better than SMS? If I change my phone number, am I just hosed? The best thing about Hangouts is that it let you message damn near anyone in any manner while being platform independent.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, for three more days.)
As I understood it, Voice was dying on the vine, and then google pushed everyone to Hangouts (to replace the built in SMS app on the phone anyways), but now Hangouts is suggesting to use other apps for SMS (but it still can anyways), so do I use GVoice or the built in one (answer: depends on the phone number you want the recipient to see). But now Allo came out, and that's somehow kinda like Hangouts but not? It has not-SMS chats like Hangouts, so it's just a hangouts replacement. But wait, Hangouts also does video chat - how's that different from Duo?
Google's product messaging is probably the most confusing in the entire technology industry.