Source: Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Source: Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020

9to5google.com

348 pointsshaklee3263 comments

Google is terrible at this. They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they? I used and loved the old Google Talk. Then they shuttered it and pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same? Not better, not worse, just a very similar experience, with maybe better voice/video support. So, now they're killing this one, too?

Is there a turf battle among teams over chat within Google? I can't think of any other reason for them to keep killing products that work and have millions of users with nearly identical products that have no users. So much wasted energy. How many times do they think people will switch platforms before switching to something else made by a company that won't kill the product every few years?

My impression from reading stories about Google culture is that there is a very strong emphasis on launching products.

That's not necessarily a bad thing for consumers if the replacement product is just as good or better than the previous one.

Putting aside quality comparisons, consider that Skype is still "Skype". Even non-technical people know what Skype is, whereas no one knows for sure what Google's Skype competitor is going to be.

> Skype is still "Skype"

In name only. Even non-technical people know what huge pile of crap "Skype" is nowadays.

No, it's the same product with enormous care for user transition. Right now I sit in a Skype chatroom continuously running since 2007.

I have the opposite experience. I hated the new UI they came out with recently and apparently so did 90% of my contact list. I used to always have it running now I barely open it.

The UI has changed more times than I care to count. Skype itself changed ownership 3 times, the underlying communication tech went from P2P to supernodes to Azure integration. At some point I ran its Linux client that hasn't been updated for 5 years. The damn thing never stopped working and the chat is still there.

Zoom is the new skype

I've never once "zoom'ed" a friend. Do you find yourself doing that frequently?

No, but I don't use Skype for that either.

And though I don't use it with friends (FaceTime mostly fills that role) I work remotely and do use Zoom several times a week for video meetings and screen sharing.

Zoom is the new Webex

Wire is made by people who made the old Skype. Open-source and E2E encryption.

Doesn't it require some weird browser extension rather than asking for camera/mic or screensharing permissions through the APIs offered in all modern browsers? Seemed like a kludge when my SO had to use it, like they took the idea of Jitsi and wrecked it.

I use their standalone program on Ubuntu at work; we're switching from hangouts/meet to zoom for a lot (though ad-hoc stuff will likely remain hangouts due to it only being one-click to start one up). It's pretty straightforward, I've almost never had issues.

I just use their desktop app.

The call quality of video and screen sharing is significantly better than Skype and hangouts.

Zoom is buggy as shit. Example: all of the control buttons randomly disappear if you are running OSX Mojave.

Wait. You're right, I guess Zoom IS the new Skype...

To be fair, most software is full of bugs, Mojave especially.

I ignored the constant reminders to update until I saw that it had reached 10.14.1. I figured with the point release they've fixed all the issues and I seem to be right so far. No issues, and I love the Dark Mode.

Zoom is bad. It hangs frequently for me... it's so frustrating.

Zoom requires like 64gb of ram to run properly when someone does screensharing

Funny you bring up skype, Microsoft is actually phasing it out (skype for business) and replacing it with MS Teams. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-teams-now-ready-rep...

Skype for Business is not Skype but a rebranded Lync.

Not surprised. Lync is terrible.

Why does it keep archiving all the conversations? Sometimes I want to continue a conversation, but it really doesn't want you to.

> Skype is still "Skype"

Except when it is Lync

Lync is an abomination that only exists to dilute the brand

No you're thinking of Office Communicator!

Replacing X with an "as good" Y is necessarily bad for consumers. It makes no sense to replace something that works. And hangouts works!

Thats silly. Consumers have to learn about the thing, learn how to use it. And those seeking to transition now don't have the google replacement.

I'm looking elsewhere.

"If".

Most of their product releases are one step forward and one step back. For example, the new Gmail is a little nicer looking, but it's a huge resource hog compared to the previous one without any striking features (though there autocomplete thing is nice). Google Meet just seems to have a few fewer features than Hangouts, and I'm not really sure what it adds.

I honestly haven't seen a new product from them that is noticeably better than whatever it replaced for quite a while. Most things seem to be change for the sake of change.

Inbox was a tragedy. It’s very effective at separating stuff I care about from stupid junk. Unfortunately it greatly reduced the time I spent looking at email. Fantastic for me, awful for ad impressions.

The new gmail is ok I guess. It’s not substantially different from Mac inbox for me to care. Either way I’ll spent some time scanning subject lines and senders. I might be an outlier though.

What new consumer software products have come out in the last year from google?

Google Duo would probably replace Hangouts

Google Due cannot be a replacement for Hangouts without a serious overhaul:

* Duo is linked via phones, not Google accounts * Duo is strictly peer-to-peer, not for groups * Duo is video/audio only, no chat/text

So, it could be a Duo-like replacement for Hangouts, maybe. But not a complete replacement. A merger of Allo + Duo (does anyone here know what Allo is?) could check some of these boxes. But one of the primary appeals of Duo is E2E encryption, and that is not in Google's interests in the long run.

There could be value in Google having an E2E encrypted messaging service if for no other reason than taking users from their competitors and keeping them in the Google ecosystem.

That was launched in 2016. My question to the OP was about their product-launching abilities. They seem rather slow on the consumer software front, i.e. they don't seem to be launching new products (or even updating existing) at the same rate that they're retiring them.

Like the article says Google Hangouts Chat will replace Hangouts. Chat even has hangouts classic backwards compatibility.

Google Chat is a horrible experience and I would advise anyone serious about communications at their company to seriously consider alternatives. I am currently forced to use it. I have documented multiple bugs in a blog post here and I have reported each one to Google multiple times without any fixes being made. We are a paying client for G Suites.

https://technex.us/2018/11/google_chat_is_the_worst_desktop_...

If it's backward compatible, why would they kill Hangouts, instead of just upgrading everyone automatically and calling it version 2? Google makes no damned sense. With all of the confusing product names, I can't figure out what they even want me, a regular Hangouts user, to do.

Chat can support Hangouts features but not vice versa.

And Windows 10 can run programs written for Windows 7 and not vice versa... so as the above commenter said, why not just call it version 2 and upgrade everyone?

But yeah, I guesss Google's culture leads to a lot of dick waving competitions...

Google has actually been making improvements to their Google Voice client again, and it is looking descent. I'm thinking the issue is they don't have a Slack/MatterMost/Zulip/Discord/Matrix type of chat client and that is what is in style now. Truly Hangouts is not setup for Teams using ChatOps, nor managing multiple channels for Enterprises.

Though, to note, Google Voice is US-only.

There's a lot of non-coding work involved in launching in a given country. Years ago, not long after GrandCentral became GV, there was a project to launch in a second country, but the effort just stalled for a variety of reasons and got cancelled. It was going to work differently from the US one because it would have lived in other market realities altogether.

How long has Google Voice been around, more than a decade? Excuses are wearing very thin. Their failure to come to Europe is the whole reason Skype exists.

I doubt it will ever come, especially to Europe. I don't think any international expansion was ever promised. I haven't worked at Google in years, so I don't know anything about current and future plans. It would be a stunning, but welcome surprise.

I think the Gmail redesign (which is a huge resource hog) and Google Meet (hangouts video replacement) were released in the last year or so.

I'm not too hip on Google products, so there's probably more that I'm missing.

Yeah and it's still rolling out slowly (or maybe the old version was still cached). Have a family member with a low-power desktop that works fine for general web browsing, video watching, email checking, and it used to be fine.

New gmail (even with hover actions turned off) is an absolute performance mess. Even just scrolling down the list of emails is choppy.

Never had a problem until now. I have no idea what Google is doing, but whatever it is there's a good chance they'll keep screwing it up

Google is dead - A rotting corpse. The people who made masterpieces were already thinking about leaving when I joined in 2010, the people who were really solid (many geniuses) are leaving now in droves. The management aren't asleep at the wheel - They're pointing in, effectively, the right directions. They just don't understand why they're losing speed.

Google is unfortunately a really solidly built ship sitting on a ton of cash and a really valuable resource whose proceeds are currently going to the parasites clinging to it's shell. The thing that made them great - Search - is still solid, and is large enough and ahead enough that it can sit still, even go backwards, and people will continue to use them for many years to come. Their money faucet, ads, went from being unobtrusive and helpful to obnoxious and exploitative to cover for the lack of forward movement of the giant it stands upon.

All that said - Google still has some great people, a great mission, and amazing tech that's still years ahead of the rest of the world. It's stock will continue to go up with Wall Street. It just isn't the place it used to be - Though, like all nostalgia, I wonder if it ever was.

"Google is unfortunately a really solidly built ship"

Why is this unfortunate? Isn't this a byproduct of their success they've had over the years? Sure, they haven't had many blowout successes in recent time, but still.

It's unfortunate because the people operating the ship and deriving profit from it aren't the ones who built it. Truth be told, I don't much like the people who work for Google now. There's still plenty of good people there, the median person is still a very good engineer and a nice person. It's the people who don't care and are looking for profit and promotion, and even the people who are just careless with the immense power and data that Google has, who scare me.

> It's stock will continue to go up with Wall Street. It just isn't the place it used to be - Though, like all nostalgia, I wonder if it ever was.

Well then who the hell cares, besides you?

Ignoring general Android features, their pixel phones have a lot of unique software, especially around Photos.

They're showing off a lot of Assistant features. Duplex is launching soon.

They're pushing a lot of ChromeOS features by adding Android App support.

Did streaming TV on Youtube come out this year?

They have a beta of their game streaming service that came out a month or two ago.

That's off the top of my head. There's a ton of smaller apps they throw at the wall all the time too.

Google Talk was better. I used that for business purposes, but once they migrated everyone to hangouts the quality -- latency, sound, etc, dropped a lot, at least as experienced by me.

I have to agree with you it must be internal politics. Otherwise why would they keep inflincting harm on themselves? But maybe they have some data that suggests this is a good idea...

Really? I get excellent quality from Hangouts. HD video with enough clarity to make out individual hairs on a cat.

Yeah, I get lagging and voice/video sync issues. Trying having a conversation with a person instead of a cat to experience it. :)

I find Hangouts handles low bandwidth and/or high latency a lot worse than FaceTime.

For starters, Google Talk had an actual client app (and then of course you could just use any XMPP client). Hangouts is a Chrome web app, which in practice means that it doesn't really behave like a proper app at all - e.g. on Windows, if you pin it to the taskbar, then close the window, and click on the taskbar icon, it'll open Chrome extensions page, not the app itself.

I still use the XMPP client, though, it never stopped working.

Google talk had a small and clean desktop client. Hangout pretty much forced me to use mobile or chrome. GTalk could communicate with any jabber network. Hangouts was all about Google's walled garden.

I finally switched to telegram and I could not be more happy.

Easy. They basically rebranded Hangouts as Meet.

Isn't Meet is part of G-suite, and only useful for in-network communication with your G-suite organization?

you can invite people from outside your org to meetings, but yes, it's not a purely public service. Duo and Allo are still out there though.

Only if you have a paid Gsuite account. Those of us grandfathered in to the Gsuite service with their free account don't get access to Meet.

>>> grandfathered in to the Gsuite service [...]

Ah, yes, ye olde "Google Apps for Domains" (boy, there's a catchy product name ...).

I've got three of them still running: two I rarely use, but the other is the family account and it's got a lot of history in the mailbox.

I'm gonna be effed if/when they pull the plug on us greybeards still rolling on that old free tier.

/Acey

p.s. The new Gmail theme sucks rocks. Anyone have a 411 how to make it look as near to the old style as possible. (tbh, I haven't hunted for an answer, but tacked this on in case anyone reading knows a good blog for that.)

I've got four still running, although 2 are mostly shut down now, I just need to pull the Google Docs. The last two are going to be bigger issues as there is a ton of mail and no good way even for an admin to transfer that mail to a new server.

One being a family account also is even more problematic, they expect Gmail quality web interface and I can't really give that to them.

Hangouts Chat is the replacement for Hangouts as far as I can see. While it is business only at this point, if they do release a customer-facing version of it, the existing Hangouts could easily die.

>Google is terrible at this. They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they? I used and loved the old Google Talk. Then they shuttered it and pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same? Not better, not worse, just a very similar experience, with maybe better voice/video support.

It's not even the same. It's worse. I used to be able to use XMPP.

Didn't Google just recently rewrite the infrastructure that supports Hangouts? IIRC that caused many Google Voice integrations to break, as they ripped out what was left of their siloed XMPP stack.

Why invest all this labor, only to announce shutdown of Hangouts a few months later?

The new Google Chat for G Suites is actually not even chat. Each chatroom is a collection of Google Wave style cards that jump over each other as activity happens in different ones. The experience is so bad I wrote a blog post about it here. https://technex.us/2018/11/google_chat_is_the_worst_desktop_...

We used it as a backup one day when our normal chat service went down. I closed it within 5 minutes and I didn’t even hit your issues which are way worse. What a shit show.

Uggh. Yeah. We've been required to use it at work, if we want real-time chat. We were using Slack before, but it was taken off the authorization list. I made a long list of things that was wrong with it while we were with it. The notifications are the worst so far. Constant notification spam for every single message. I disabled everything ... and it still sent them. I had to turn them off in iOS.

Because people at google need promotions and launches are one of the few good ways to get them.

Or maybe they are too busy protesting[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][..] instead of focusing on product ;-)

Interestingly, before 2017, very few (no?) public news of them employees walking out or protesting publicly @ Google. It's almost like Sergey going to the airport to protest opened the floodgates[6]. The Times They Are a-Changin' (or no good deed goes unpunished...).

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/read-google-employees-open-l... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/01/google-em... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/30/google-employees-protest-tru... [5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/07/542020041... [6] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/28/14428262/google-sergey-br... [7] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/google-employees-s... [8] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/01/sopa-blackou... [..] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/12/whoops-g...

Google's been killing their products left, right, and centre long before this whole thing. Absolutely no link.

I hate when people just downvote posts that don't align with their politics.

This wasn't downvoted because of a lack of political alignment; it was downvoted because there's absolutely no link.

The post implies a causal link, but there isn't even a correlational one; Google has been shuttering its own projects only a couple of years after launch for years, long before the current round of employee protests.

That’s usually the case for any big corporation.

I think Google is at a place where it feels they have too many cooks. Just focus on the core things like Apple.

I'm thoroughly convinced one of the strategies of large tech companies is to suck all the air out of the room when it comes to engineer talent.

I've seen the inside of these corporations - most of the stuff people work on is way below their pay grade (even if it still technically needs to get done) yet they still have a ridiculously rigorous interview process and somehow manage to hire like crazy with salaries and benefits way better than a startup can offer. It just doesn't make sense unless the goal is to deprive potential up and coming competitors of talent.

I don't think that strategy is very effective though. The supply of developers is quite elastic in the long term and it just drives competitors to increase their engineering efficiency.

Also to pay more than they would normally.

Sry what?

Google has enough very good products which shows what Google is doing.

Yes they have some issues with wave, talk, hangout and duo but also have gmail, search, drive, etc.

Apple not always gets it right and Google also.

The problem is, they haven't even launched anything to replace Hangouts!

Think they will? anyway, what really worries me right now is what's going to happen with all those stored hangout conversations, will those still be accessible? will users be allowed to download them? or everything is getting deleted?

https://twitter.com/happyinwater/status/1068861340800958466

Apparently they'll be migrated to Hangouts Chat.

My Project Fi calling/texting from computer features are in limbo, though.

Performance wise it's much worse, too. Hangouts has always been a bloates mess. Only on recent high performance smartphones that hasn't been obvious.

> pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same?

While Google is terrible at this, I believe there is one other major difference: IIRC, Talk did not have cloud sessions. You could not switch from desktop to mobile and continue a conversation right where you left off. (The closet you could get was look at archived messages in Gmail.)

Hangouts, like virtually any modern chat system, does have this. So they did add at least one feature that's pretty useful for people even when not using voice and video.

For business conference calling they have meet, which is pretty similar to Hangouts for that purpose and is what we use at my office for conference calls.

I've never tried to make a call to a single person with Hangouts because Snap, FaceTime, and others are better. They also had another app that competes with Snap and FaceTime; I don't recall the name.

So, seems like their shutting down something that's already been replaced by their own tech.

I may get scorn for saying this but it's the byproduct of a developer-first culture. They build amazingly functional products with no clear product strategy or branding. They need much more customer-focussed and product-focussed. That's why Apple and Amazon beat them on everything except search.

>I may get scorn for saying this but it's the byproduct of a developer-first culture.

Google is now a promotions-first culture. You get promoted for launching new stuff, not for doing the work to make someone else's vision better.

A company of rockstars without audiance.

The bazillions of android users relying on Google services is a big audience, and fundamentally captive too.

I reckon the problem is that very few services actually make money, everything else is so low-stakes in monetary terms that they can afford to be super-casual about it.

It may be some grander plan to slice an IT cartel cake by big-cos. G+ to FB, Hangouts > FB Messenger. Non aggresion pact in force for me.

There was also Google duo, which was.. the same but different?

> They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they?

Hangouts chat is supposed to be the replacement: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

It might be made available to (non-gsuite) consumers at some point.

I think the replacement is supposed to be just straight texting now that they have the rich text protocol or whatever.

Kinda stupid, but like - that's Google's chat strategy in a nutshell.

Android Police' headline is spot on:

"Report: Google killing Hangouts in 2020, probably launching 8 new messaging services in its place" [0].

Mayur Kamat was HO's product manager until 2015 and has posted a few updates on G+ until he left Google, probably because Hangouts was internally about to be abandoned. Thats when I realized Hangouts fate and started looking elsewhere.

I vividly remember his remark around the time of the Hangouts 4.0 release [1]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :). Good stuff is coming.": Alas, it wasn't.

Edit: Maybe adding that name was wrong, my intention was not to blame any single person.

Fact is: I liked Google Talk (and Hangouts) a lot for its superior abilities back then: Federation with XMPP, cross device compatibility, superior synch, possibly reach anyone with a G account, simultaneous login from different devices, permanent cloud based history, working search. It seemed so easy to win at that time.

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/30/report-google-killi...

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

I can believe he and his team wanted to make Hangouts better. Seems nobody else was on their side though.

Absolutely no blaming on him. He was responsible for Microsoft Messenger (if i'm not mistaken) before and the uncertainty with Google chat products (Allo, Duo, Hangouts Meet and who knows what else) is continuing without him.

What have we come to when a tired silly meme is called "spot on" in the top comment on HackerNews.

I will never adopt a google product again. g+ may be a total failure hangouts may be the less popular chat product

But for me and my kids this was the channels we used when they grew up. We have so much history in our family chat and so many photos shared on google+.

So now they just shut it down and don't even bother to migrate 10 years of my life to whatever is meant to replace those products.

We are a generation who will leave nothing behind.

Some time ago there was that comics about the "Chad's garage":

https://xkcd.com/1150/

The most interesting point is, "Chad" is really actively promoting his garages as something the people should definitely use... until he changes his opinion from time to time which garage and if at all the people should use this or that, and then lets people figure out what should they do next.

And "Chad" is very rich and powerful, so people are attracted. Nice shelves every time.

> We have so much history in our family chat

I don't think any IM chat product has ever promised to keep your history. They all let you "scroll back" on a best-effort basis, but I don't know of any IM chat service where the availability of historical messages is part of the semantics of the service. It's just... not what they're for.

If you want the semantics of "real-time chat with history", what you actually want is a business collaboration tool, like Slack or its competitors. Businesses want records of meetings and the ability to dredge up stuff somebody said once, and are willing to pay for it, so services designed with business productivity in mind tend to have these semantics.

(And even then, I don't think Slack makes any guarantees that it'll retain the history of your private DMs, only the history of your public channels. Exporting an archive of a Slack workspace doesn't get you archives of the DMs. So it would seem that, even for a business, the semantics of one-to-one conversations are more ephemeral than not.)

Chat history was absolutely part of the semantics of Google Talk/Hangouts. You've always been able to search that history in Gmail by using the filter "in:chats" and it used to be explicitly exposed in the Gmail UI as a label. Every last word is saved there unless you choose not to have it.

Well I can trust Facebook Messenger to always keep my data there and never delete it.

Which for a chat service is really good.

You can? When did they promise that? What is stopping them from throwing away history next year?

ICQ and Trillian would save your chat history if you put something in the settings. I don't think AIM did, but I was able to export them individually, I think. I still have a decent amount of my chat log history from back then because of it. I have a lot more of it from back then than I do now that it's all done within hangouts/facebook.

Actually, you should not be relying on any social networks, if you want to keep history reliably. At least you can export all your data now.

By their own admission they got to use this product for over a decade, and somehow that's unacceptable. We also have no idea yet what the migration will be, and no matter what, your data most definitely won't be lost.

>> We are a generation who will leave nothing behind.

I mean, if you want you could hand write letters. Or post your chats on a private blog/wiki for posterities sake.

You might be older than me, but you just made me feel like an old timer. I feel like I learned this lesson when AIM shuttered, and I am now numb to the feeling that all our data is both fleeting and yet permanent. Everything since then I've been much less attached to any data I put out there unless I make a real effort to save it on my own bare metal. Also I like to think that somewhere I've got my AIM chat logs saved off in all their ever changing font/multi-colored glory....

(Obligatory mention of Google Reader, beloved by many, but completely contrary to the internet they want you to see)

Serious question: why did they get rid of fonts and colors? And most IM apps still don't have handwriting. I had entire relationships built around sending back and forth silly drawings in handwriting.

I feel like the quality of instant messaging software peaked in the early 2000s, and 15 years later we still haven't achieved the same level, or even close?

Good question. The cynic in me wants to say it's because chat apps can't mine "creative expression" like they can plain text . Or maybe just single-minded UI design thinking that under no circumstances should anyone use pink comic sans.... Either way, what you're describing really strikes home to me. I miss the internet that was full of colorful dialog, encouraged creative expression, and was full of interesting offbeat websites willing to inspire the imagination. These days even most of hacker news is atlantic or bloomberg articles, and I can't find any good design/image blogs that just curate good shit anymore (ffffound anyone?)....

That's the reason I choose OSS for everything where the data is important to me.

Google should claw back bonuses and promotions involved in creating these services that get assassinated, to get people thinking more long-term. While I intensely dislike Google's product management, I feel like there might be a point in their favor that these developers or teams who are driven to only launch new stuff instead of maintaining and enhancing the old stuff are creating CS nightmares that can't be refactored, can't be extended, and the original developers may not even be found there anymore. In other words, to be fair to Google, this may be a problem of their own incentives.

Do you really think the team that made, say, Google Talk, were the ones who wanted to kill it and push everyone to a different product? I don't know who made either one, but I would be shocked if the decision maker that pulled the plug had anything to do with the creation of the product. I, personally, don't like to kill my babies.

Clawing back bonuses for something out of the control of the engineers seems like a dystopian nightmare, and any company that tried it would, hopefully, die a fiery death after an exodus of talent to more reasonable employers.

> I, personally, don't like to kill my babies.

I do. Software isn't my progeny or legacy. It is the tools in my workshop. If I can use one tool to do the work of five, I'll gladly downsize to declutter and simply my life.

Finding self-worth in the longevity of tools is an emotional anti-pattern.

I think you're taking him a bit too literally. In these examples, you're not looking at simplifying anything. You're not getting rid of unneeded code. You're getting rid of debugged and stable code in favor of writing something new from scratch because fuck all knows why.

In this case, worst case, it's multiple groups of engineers all advocating for their pet projects. They can all be wrong and concerned about personal sunk costs instead of having some perspective and humility and working together to the extent it makes sense.

I gather maybe the Google advancement structure discourages doing nothing and generally being stable when it makes sense, in which case there could be plenty of improvement to be had all around.

Oddly enough, I assume the Google advancement structure values anything but stability. You launch products to get promoted. Maintaining them is for fools and losers.

Granted, I have no inside information. That just fits the externally observable information and the tiny amount of corporate politics that occasionally makes its way public.

So, what part of Google's chat strategy fits your description of "downsize to declutter and simplify"?

Google has had something like...seven(?) chat and chat-like projects, and each new iteration of "let's kill the most popular chat product we have" seems to result in several new chat-like things, most of which fail and many of which are weirdly complicated and/or confusingly branded/messaged.

I was agreeing with your point. It seems pretty obvious that the end goal is something simpler for both the engineer and the end user. The defensiveness of some engineers to protect their particular contributions is a net negative.

It seems pretty obvious that the end goal is something simpler for both the engineer and the end user.

I don't mean to be short, but...based on what evidence?

Do you really think the team that made, say, Google Talk, were the ones who wanted to kill it and push everyone to a different product?

Man, for all the lore and blogging that operates around working at Google, the skills of people who get hired, plus the first-hand accounts of what it takes to move up the ladder there, I'd think they'd be able to release things by people who make their products less killable. Ah, but reality rarely meets the legend.

This is my point: what if what gets released by Google is just bad software engineering? Maybe SOLID-deficient. If products are killed because they don't have the features contained in subsequent iterations of the concepts, how come the products were not extensible, or capable of being grafted onto something else? I seem to remember reading about this kind of thing being a big part of software engineering.

I think the acronym Google always misses out on is KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) because no one there is "stupid." If you only hire geniuses, no one wants to write documentation or do things the boring/easy way that would create more maintainable software.

Instead everyone there has to use the latest framework or best practices, then re-engineer things to prove they deserve their top-performer salary.

I think the first Google Hangouts was written in Angular 1? Code rot from frameworks like that will ensure the product will die in 5 years at a company like Google. Everyone at Google is a "top-performer" so they want to use the latest development tools and shiny things and no one wants to upgrade/maintain 5 year old code written in an old framework.

I think a lot of other companies get around this by hiring less than top performers. Those types of coders will maintain legacy systems because they don't have as much pride. So I think it's mainly a problem that Google has a culture of tech elitism, instead of a culture that focuses on user satisfaction.

I think you are correct but I want to add that most of the top programmers I have met have had zero issues with doing maintainance work. Just look at many of the big names in open source if you need some examples.

I think Google's culture is to blame, but this culture is ptobably created much due to only hiring top performers, rather than other companies who have to do with a mix of skill levels.

Every large old piece of code is "bad engineering" to the next generation that looks at it. That doesn't mean throwing it away and throwing away all the users and starting over is a rational path forward. The new engineers will just fuck it up in new and exciting ways and won't have all of the experience of the old version built in (and will have to learn those lessons over again, probably).

If you're Google, you already have APIs that serve client applications (there's no such thing as a monolithic Google app, because Google can't launch anything at small enough scale to do a monolith). If your engineers really fucked up the first one so bad you can't fix it and improve it (which I don't believe to be the case, nothing that bad would survive production at Google scale, particularly for a popular product like Hangouts), you just rewrite the damned clients, call it the new (version 2, whatever) Hangouts, and don't confuse your customers (yet again) with a maelstrom of wacky new chat-like products and force them to choose to install and learn something new (again).

But, it seems like a real stretch to say that Google secretly has a bunch of unskilled hacks working there, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And, it's even weirder to suggest that if Google is secretly a den of incompetence that starting over from scratch would be a good idea.

My point is two-pronged: Starting over with a new confusingly named/positioned product is bad business. Throwing away the old, functional, product, to launch a new one that is very similar (how different can a chat really be and still be useful and recognizable?) is bad engineering.

Every large old piece of code is "bad engineering" to the next generation that looks at it.

I'm pretty sure this is only true to undergrads in the dorms (and people who still think like them). Computer Science has its own form of Medical Students Disease[1]. NIH Syndrome[2] is also more prevalent than it might appear.

it seems like a real stretch to say that Google secretly has a bunch of unskilled hacks working there

it's even weirder to suggest that if Google is secretly a den of incompetence

Nobody said these things, but to address the hypotheticals, a) there is a difference between unskilled and ignorant ("prone to ignore the existence of useful concepts," let's say); b) are there any other forms of competence that might address the ability to launch something impressive that does not fly? Couldn't they be partly incompetent? After all, pobody's nerfect.

We talk about Louis Bleriot much more than Percy Pilcher, and to continue the analogy I'd say Google has gotten very very good at making Gee Bees[3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gee_Bee_Model_R

At one point Hangouts was super easy to use. Send someone a link and they could join.

The interface was iterated on repeatedly until it got to the point that I could barely figure out how in the world to invite people to join a Hangout without having at least a few people run into problems.

It is my belief that Uberconference exists because Google dropped the ball so badly with Hangouts.

For a brief moment, Hangouts let us live in an amazing future where group video chats happened spontaneously, and then someone had to iterate.

My take: we need to stop incentivizing "innovation" where everything needs to be rewritten every couple months just so someone can "disrupt" something.

You know what it really is? It's a bunch of product people, all of who want to be Steve Jobs II, looking at the handful of innovative products Apple made over the last couple of decades and trying to achieve something similar results every single quarter.

The problem? We've raised a whole generation of people who think that's not how you make products people love. We've have a whole generation of people who focus 100% on the ideation phase and 0% on the nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback.

This fits into a larger theory I have that basically disruptive startups are the weeds of the ecosystem, but they aren't old growth trees. Call me old fashioned but I'm looking forward to the day "disruptive" companies based on "growth hacking" are replaced by some giant redwood trees that will stand the test of time as they (slowly) soar into the sky.

This doesn’t really hold true in China —- Steve Jobs is revered there but their startup scene is heavily oriented towards iterating and pivoting

You're talking like these are the same people ideating and then dropping products over and over.

No: the people who build each product, even at Google, certainly enter a "nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback" phase with that product.

The "problem", if you want to call it that, is that there are always new product people joining the company. And what the heck are they going to do to get recognized and promoted, if they don't build a new fiefdom to call their own?

The actual question I have about Google and its business strategy, is why these new products always seem to displace old products (and their teams), rather than resulting in the internal equivalent of a merger.

I can see good reason to have four teams building four distinct web VoIP clients, if one of them is the "flagship" one and three of them are experiments. I can also imagine one of those "experiments" getting really popular. But why should that result in the "flagship" dying? Why not just merge the teams together, and put the team from the "experiment" in charge of the pooled UX design talent for a new release of the "flagship" client?

You’re describing exactly what Google is doing with Gmail and Inbox.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but my projects are only tangentially related.

Yes, Gmail after the Inbox "experiment" is an example of Google doing the right thing. I'm just wondering why that strategy is so rare. Is it a new mode of thinking within Google? Did Google only recently manage to become 'un-flat' enough that there are people with high-level project-management expertise available to suggest something like a merger between two teams?

> there are always new product people joining the company. And what the heck are they going to do to get recognized and promoted

Maybe I don’t get it, but it seems weird to me that everyone needs to get promoted all the time.

Where I live you get employed in a position and most people stay in that position for most of their career.

You may climb the ranks, but that’s not something everyone does all the time.

At Google, promotion does not change your position, it changes your "Level", which roughly rewards you for having wider-ranging influence as an engineer. You don't get promoted to management or anything like that. You stay an engineer.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Thank you. I thought I was alone with these thoughts.

I was not promoted in 5 years, since I joined my current company, and that is OK. I still have 32 years to work, at least.

If Google does this it may be the thing that finally convinces me to move my messaging and phone away from their ecosystem. Hangouts has kinda been the thing holding my experience together as I adopted Google voice early and a lot of people only have that number, biggest mistake of my life right there. We'll see though, talk is cheap and I'm lazy, so most likely I just tolerate the abuse.

If it helps, I moved away from Google Voice a while ago by porting my number. Went to Verizon, got a new number and got a iPhone running. Then called Verizon and ported my google voice number onto the new number. Google asked for $10 for porting out. I happily obliged. My phone number moved over without any pauses in service. I’ve been using iMessage/SMS ever since and it works wonders.

Edit: spelling

I had ported my phone number to Google Voice back when I was using Android phones. My wife insists on Apple products and eventually I switched to an iPhone myself. I ported my number back out but set up another Google Voice number.

Now, if I miss a call, it forwards to the GV number. So I get transcriptions (via email) which aren't perfect but better than anything else I've seen.

9 times out of 10, I don't need to call the person back. It's a reminder, it's somebody I'll see later that day, etc.

I do wish that GV would not send me notices that I have voicemail when the person (or more likely a computer) hung up when they heard voicemail.

The GV number is also useful for things that insist on SMS where I want a secure number. No way for a person to go into a store and insist on getting my number transferred to their phone.

There have been no major updates to Voice in a while (thankfully), but lots of marketing and buzz around Project Fi. I can't help but think that Google will kill Google Voice in the future. Google Voice is integrated with Hangouts as well, which means one of those features will go away, assuming the OP is true. I love using Voice for the same reasons you listed out, but I dread when Google decide to make a change in this space, I'll be very disappointed.

I don't see Google voice going away since it's the service they use for the home phone add-on with fiber.

The point of this shutdown (and the Google+ shutdown) is that the services are going away for consumers, ie. moving to completely focus on GSuite integration. Google voice is still in the "Additional Google services" category and doesn't have GSuite integration beyond call-in Hangouts, so I doubt they will abandon their fiber G Voice customers any time soon.

Messaging in the Google ecosystem is probably the biggest mess of any of their product lines. It should be a case study in business schools.

yes, I'll be damned if I ever use Allo, no matter how many ads I receive about it.

Google's behavior with its messaging platforms really boggles my mind. There's always more to a story sure, and certainly more to why google keeps jumping around - or perhaps flopping around is a better term here. But honestly, one would think whatever behind-the-scene reasons would have settled down by now, eh?

I think google should simply take the plunge and adopt matrix as their messaging protocol. The protocol provides messaging and telephony. Since - much like email - matrix is federated, google could even pair matrix server hosting with their G Suite products. Basically google would be an organization's email, docs, and now matrix/messaging server provider (in addition to the other services included in g suite)...I'm not the biggest fan of google (nor g suite), but i do acknowledge that so many organizations depend on google for their g suite platform. Also, leveraging - and contributing to the greater matrix.org effort - the matrix platform would show the world that google is still happy to collaborate on open source efforts.

...Or, maybe i'm thinking too altruistically?

You absolutely are. If Google cared a decade ago they could have strong arm overhauled XMPP into whatever they wanted. Even Facebook Messenger (which also used XMPP until I want to say 2016? which is coincidentally when I stopped ever using Facebook messenger) would have bent to their will.

They simply chose not to, and instead make yet another proprietary non-federated protocol and practically single handledly fractured what was at the time turning into a reasonable communication ecosystem where MSM, Facebook Messenger, and GTalk were all the big games in town but were also all XMPP compatible.

Oh wow, i totally forgot about xmpp; you're right! I forgot how i enjoyed using pidgin client to interact with my gTalk friends.

The only thing I still use Hangouts for is ongoing big group chats with old groups of friends (e.g. little convo every couple weeks), because:

1) Everyone's got a Gmail tab open during the day so they'll see it eventually but it doesn't bother them immediately like SMS and they don't need to install anything. (Literally no other service my friends have in common, e.g. some have Slack and some use Facebook but definitely not everyone.)

2) Group SMS is still a mess -- when you start one with a new group of friends (e.g. classmates) it just shows as random phone numbers for everyone, nobody has names until you create contacts for all of them, and there are still always mysterious problems like some messages only going between iPhones, messages being duplicated and triplicated, etc...

So if this is true, I guess my old chat groups will just... die... oh well. Maybe we'll go back to e-mail, but it doesn't feel as fun.

You could set up a Discord, maybe. It means another thing to keep an eye on, but the Discord client is pretty good and has deeply configurable push notifications.

2019: We are happy to announce our joining of forces with Discord! It's our hope that, together, we can create a more cohesive Google experience.

2022: All good things must come to an end! It was a wild ride, but sadly, we will be closing Discord to make way for a more cohesive Google experience.

I use Facebook Messenger for group chats. I suppose that requires that the people you're trying to stay in touch with are also on Facebook though, which seems less common these days.

You can make a Messenger-only account with just a phone number, provided that phone number has never been linked to a 'real' Facebook account.

Of course, Facebook is almost certainly creating a 'shadow profile' for all of those users in case they ever decide to join Facebook so it doesn't really solve the privacy issues that anyone who chooses not to use FB likely has.

> You can make a Messenger-only account with just a phone number, provided that phone number has never been linked to a 'real' Facebook account.

Wait, how does that work? If my phone number previously belonged to someone who had it linked to a Facebook account, then I can never use it for a Messenger account?

The last time I tried it, it would only prompt me to sign in to the linked account. No option to make a new account or disassociate that number from the account.

The killer feature of Hangouts and Talk before it was always that people didn't need to sign up for or install anything if they already had a Google account. That was lightyears ahead in 2006 when most people were using a desktop mail client and one or more desktop chat clients and SMS to talk on the go.

Fast forward to 2018 and the probability of convincing any non-tech person to sign up for a new service just to talk to you is even lower than in 2006 when new services at least had novelty.

That's not been my experience with group sms. It's worked perfectly, and all names show properly

What's really funny about this is that video conferencing during meetings is really good inside of google. They have a winner product on their hands and don't know how to get it to businesses where they would make tons of money. So amazingly bad at turning innovation into product.

> What's really funny about this is that video conferencing during meetings is really good inside of google

I've heard the opposite of this from some googler friends.

Hah, I completely disagree with them. VC/Calendar/Mail integration is amazing here.

Disc: Googler.

They offer it on their website: https://gsuite.google.com/products/hangouts-meet-hardware/

But the prices are steep compared to what a lot of small to medium businesses are willing to pay for when they think they can just use their laptops.

The link above is for the hardware version. If you just want the software, you can use Hangouts Meet, which is free to install and also included in G Suite.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Hangouts.

Hangouts meet is different than just hangouts? Sorry for the silly question but I honestly have no idea anymore.

Yes, “hangouts meet” and “hangouts chat” are separate apps for gsuite customers.

For consumers there is the “hangouts” app which this article is about.

Huh, if this existed and I had known about this 3 years ago, it would have been a trivial purchase at the startup I was at. We ended up moving everyone to headset mics and doing all our meetings with remote people on computers, despite a lot of people in one place, since otherwise remote folks just couldn't hear what was going on reliably. Which worked, but had it's own limitations.

Probably a harder sell for larger companies with more rooms, and less remote employees, but I have never had a complaints about audio with these things.

it says "for consumers"

google is repositioning hangouts and google+ as competitors to office 365 teams and yammer. facebook is working on workplace. compared to how google usually kills products, this does seem somewhat foward looking to a near future workplace social battle.

Unsurprisingly, consumers and enterprise want, and use, different products, and in different ways.

We used the Google ecosystem for business for a while. It's good if you have really good internet; absolutely useless if you don't. Other conferencing software degraded more gracefully. I suspect Google is better at investing in and upkeeping their corporate internet infrastructure than most companies.

Other problem was that they never really added new features, and had the least features to begin with, so eventually the IT department and their feature sheet based comparison went with a competitor.

I've often gone out of my way to encourage people who want to message me to use hangouts in order to have a better chatting experience (versus SMS). And since I have Google Fi, the hangouts integration was perfect such that people who I couldn't convince to use hangouts would text me and I'd still have all the nice message synchronization features in the same app (which as far as I know nothing else offers - a web based client that's not dependent on the phone being available for receiving SMS). All that to say, I'll be sad to lose such nice integration with SMS. Although I can see Google still providing hangouts to Google Fi customers, I think it's probably time to jump ship at this point.

Does anybody know if Matrix supports e2e encrypted chat yet? I don't really follow the project closely, but if this issue is up to date then it's not quite there yet: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779. I realize that bug is for the web client, but I'd feel better anyway knowing one of the biggest clients is using the feature.

There was a point a few years ago when most of my IMing was on Google. Now it's largely moved to Facebook and WhatsApp. So, maybe this is the right decision, but Google had what feels to me like a decisive market lead at one point that they frittered away because they couldn't manage a consistent strategy on messaging. And I guess I need to start trying to find the few stragglers I talk to through Hangouts on other messenger services.

aol - aim

yahoo - yahoo messenger

microsoft - msn, skype

google - talk, voice, hangouts

basically every one took too long to adapt to either web or mobile.

Yes, well, I can understand why mobile was hard on AOL. I have a harder time understanding why the maker of the most popular mobile platform couldn't get their messaging story straight.

Originally Hangouts looked Google's answer to Apple's iMessage. You could send and receive messages via Hangouts or SMS within the same Android app. You could use Hangouts on your computer via Gmail or a standalone app.

Then a few years ago they started pushing you to use SMS from a separate app, and eventually removed SMS functionality from the Hangouts Android app altogether.

Then they launched Allo and pushed it for consumers, but from all accounts it flopped miserably.

Now they're apparently going to push an evolution of SMS (RCS) as their consumer chat product. I'm wonder how they plan to integrate that on desktop.

Personal anecdote: My wife and I have kept using Hangouts to communicate with each other out of inertia. On Android it's seemed stagnant for ages, but it's simple and works reliably. For family and friends we're using a mix of SMS and Facebook Messenger due to their preferences. Both of those are annoying, although in different ways. I suppose if consumer Hangouts dies we'll have to look at Whatsapp, Signal, etc. and see what's best.

> On Android it's seemed stagnant for ages, but it's simple and works reliably.

"stagnant" implies it should be changing, but then you say "it works reliably". No changes for a year is 'rock solid' and 'stable', not 'needs an iteration push next month!'.

It works reliably, but there's room for improvement. Two examples: Video call quality is noticably worse than Google Duo. Unlike SMS, Google Assistant can't read my Hangouts messages to me.

Hangouts worked in Android Auto voice assistant until recently. I don’t know if that was the same as the regular assistant

I realized there's a middle ground, of course, after posting. I'm not a regular android user, but understand the 'room for improvement' line of thought for software in general. However, given how much things generally go downhill when new versions are released, 'improvements' in a real sense are often hard to come by. Often, I much prefer my stagnant releases vs watching features I use go away, or UI changes hide my normal workflows in 'upgrades'.

That's not true. Hangouts for Android has always been able to do sms, even today.

Nope, they removed SMS from Hangouts in 2017 unless you're in the minority using Project Fi or Google Voice.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/05/22/sms-support-hangout...

https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3441321?hl=en

That is not the minority. I've been using hangouts with a google voice number for over 5 years, and SMS still works fine. Most of the benefits from hangouts come from using a google voice number anyways (VoIP calls, SMS over IP), so it's definitely not the minority.

To be clear, I mean you're in the minority of Android users. Since 2017 most Android users can't send SMS through Hangouts.

I see what you mean. That definitely makes sense since it was discontinued :).

IM in general is such a mess.

All I really want is to have a single ID that people can use to text me from any device they might have (without having to install a special app, because they won't do it just for me), and that I can receive on any device that I have. We did this for email decades ago; why is IM not there yet?

Because email was not designed by capitalists.

Soviets or Chinese? I keep forgetting which non-capitalists designed email.

He just means it wasn’t designed for the purpose or future hope of profits

So what does this mean for Google Voice and Google Fi users? All my SMS runs through Hangouts.

With Google Voice + Hangouts you can also answer phone calls from a desktop computer/laptop very easily. I'll miss that.

www.google.com/voice Should be able to make calls from there, right?

I don't think that works for receiving incoming calls though.

There’s a slider in the iOS app that indicates it might be possible to enable. I’ll have to try that when I have a chance.

I recently looked into ways to do this outside of the US. Seems to be basically impossible other than using an iPhone/Mac with Continuity. :(

No, Hangouts works great for this outside of the US. I use it in New Zealand all the time.

IFF you have a GV number, which is US-only.

There's a google voice app.

But it doesn't do SMS on the desktop.

If you are on a mac, I created a simple web wrapper for the google voice website and puts it on the menubar, you can SMS on the desktop that way. Link to the app voicenotifies.com

Google Voice? Google Fi?

There may be a more fundamental question here.

They _just_ rebranded from Project Fi to Google Fi, and featured it on the google.com home page, so it seems safe for now.

But it still requires Hangouts to make and accept phone calls on other devices, so far as I can see.

https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6188337?hl=en&ref_topic...

You can do SMS via Android Messages and use messages.android.com on a computer. However, unlike Hangouts, it just connects to your phone to send and receive messages.

Google Fi will be unchanged; I've been using Messages from the beginning. Voice, however, has a much better experience with Hangouts than with the standalone Voice app, and in particular the standalone Voice app doesn't let you make VoIP calls as far as I can tell.

It needs to be something that can work as a background app with notifications etc.

Messages on the web does support notifications, though you do have to keep it open. (But then, the same applies to Hangouts unless you use the Chrome app.)

What do you mean by, "However, unlike Hangouts, it just connects to your phone to send and receive messages,"? My Google Voice number is my primary number but not my cell-service number. Would messages.android.com send/receive SMS as my Google Voice number or my cellular carrier number?

Whichever number you have working through the Android Messages app on your phone. messages.android.com just connects (via Google) to the app on your phone, displays your messages from that, and lets you compose and send messages via that.

Yeah, this is a problem for me. I'm a long, long time Google Voice user. It is my main phone number. I do all my calls and SMS via Hangouts on my computer. It's pretty rare for me to use my phone. I'm going to be lost if I can't do this any longer, honestly.

I also have a very long time Grandcentral/Google Voice number 541-306-3055, and it’s been a journey.

Suggestion of the day: They should integrate Google Voice + Android Messages / RCS to make a true iMessage competitor (with encryption / web sync / etc) AND THEN replace all references of _consumer_ Hangouts/Messaging with this new service. Here's where they could integrate it:

-Gmail (as either the hangouts widget replacement or a new Gmail Addon) -Google Maps (so that any conversations you have show up in your main messages app too) -YouTube (why did they even make YouTube Messages? Put this in there so those messages show up in this unified app) -Google Sheets/Docs/Slides (so all comments / conversations can then be seen & referenced in this unified app) -Google Assistant Conversations (so you can see what you've written, but also have the conversation handy - similar, but more streamlined, to how it was/is in Allo) -Duo (so it's tightly integrated & conversations just magically work - similar to FaceTime/iMessage) -Google One (so all customer support conversations can also be bundled & seen in one unified view) -Hangouts Chat / Hangouts Meet (so if you use those services, they have a channel in this app too) -Anywhere else you use a Google service to type things!

This would be the ULTIMATE messaging app. Here, I'll even throw in ways to monetize (so that it can live on forever):

-You have your main chats, but also all these premium "channels"/"add-ons" (like the ones above) that outside business could integrate into within this app. Charge them similar to how WhatsApp is doing it -Create an add-on store for stickers/fonts/themes (similar to FB Messenger) but integrate into Play store for more revenue) -Sell this service to GSuite customers as a call center / messaging-based customer support service -Create an SMS api for developers and charge for its use (like Twilio and company)

No ads. No subscription service (though I'd happily pay $1 per year - which at their scale could be billions). No hassle. No fragmentation. No problems. World hunger solved

/end rant

P.S. - If anyone wants to make this service, I'd happily co-found a company to do exactly this.

Anyone know of a good alternative for group chat that doesn't tie your account to your phone#?

My friends and I were joking about going back to icq since web.icq.com still works.

https://wire.com/ should work if your friends are willing to move.

See matrix.org. Matrix is the protocol, but there are numerous server and client implementations, with riot.im being the most popular client and matrix.org being the most popular server.

Riot.im makes vim's UX seem intuitive.

I use discord, which works great.

IRC

Wire needs neither phone number nor contacts. Open-source, E2E encryption and working on IETF federation protocol with other messengers.

Zoom.us Skype. Zoom’s video is great, doesn’t heat my Mac like Hangouts

Signal. Open source and secure.

> doesn't tie your account to your phone#?

XMPP.

And yes, my 19 years old icq account still works.

GOGON: Get off Google, now. :P

Weird things are going to happen if Google were to shrink: paid gmail, premium search, subscription navigation in maps, lock screen ads in android, and hard monetisation of user data. A giant doesn’t go away without a fight, but Google users are not its customers, just data in its products, so...

Big surprise! Another useful Google service gets put down. Why even bother launching products if you’re just gonna kill them after 2 years?

What about Hangouts calling (inbound/outbound) with your Google voice number? I'm moving from the US to the UK next month and was hoping to maintain my US number by porting it to Google Voice and using Hangouts calls. Anyone know an alternative?

Google is shutting down a product? That is so shocking. To be honest, this is the exact reason we didn't go with Google Cloud. We have zero trust that they won't just shut it off one day, no matter what they might claim.

I do use google mail and google docs, but I always make sure I have anything important saved in a separate location so I'm prepared when these products are inevitably shut off.

I'll get to my real pain point - anyone know of a replacement VOIP solution like Hangouts dialer that isn't subscription based? I've been giving my Hangouts number to people forever because its more convenient to have every device I have ring when someone uses the old PSTN but its not worth a recurring bill to me.

At this point, what do Googlers even use to chat internally? Slack? Skype?

My experience so far in 2018 is they communicate via gmail messages and gdoc comments

"Man, if only we worked for a large software conglomerate... then we wouldn't have to use Cisco phones or communicate through Excel documents!"

I doubt this, as hangouts is integrated deeply into google fi, such that all sms messages between google fi users just go thru hangouts and hangouts is also used to send out going texts.

Hangouts also powers google fi's wifi calling.

Ask HN: any other IM client that has Hangout's transparent UI for desktops? I really like how unobtrusive it is.

Why do they insist on putting out useful products only to cancel them? Wtf is wrong with them?

I'm not sure, but I've noticed the result is that I'm consciously using fewer and fewer google services. The more they keep doing this (just abandoning products, or charging astronomically more for them), the less likely I am to use their other services - or new ones, because I don't trust that they'll be around tomorrow. If you continuously show someone you're not stable or reliable, eventually they'll take the hint and believe you. I hope that's what they're going for because it's working. This year there's just been a lot of this with Inbox, G+, Maps increases, and now Hangouts.

Looks like Google is shutting down most of the consumer focused platforms where someone in the organization believes it’s expensive and not making money like selling ads does.

I’m confident on Gmail and Maps staying around for the long term. The rest of the consumer side platforms could be removed or replaced (yet again).

this is basically what happens when BigTechCorp leaves its product decisions to the competitive empire building machinations of middle managers with 4 year vesting

I use Hangouts every single day, all day. It's the only app that let's me both chat and SMS from any device I have. I'll miss it very much when it's gone, as there is simply no replacement :/

Add it to the list. killedbygoogle.com

Why? It's one of the best messaging platforms out there. Everyone I know has an email account. It is easier to reach me by gmail (and thus hangouts) than it is to reach me by phone, because my phone has bad service.

Why on earth would they kill one of their best and most popular services? I don't use FB messenger at all, whatsapp reveals my phone number, Skype is an ABSOLUTE joke, and not everyone has Line, Viber, Telegram and so on.

Google needs to hire Satya Nadella as the CEO.

What is it replaced with?

Knowing Google it'll be 8 new, competing messaging products called: H, A, N, G, O, U, T and S. Each capturing one aspect of the essence of hangouts and building an entire chat experience around it that will be the future of chat.

Duo most likely

Google Duo needs to bring long distance calling service if it is to replace Hangouts.

Allo, which is already being abandoned itself, never having gained the traction of Hangouts. Ultimately, it looks like Google is giving up in favor of RCS (the rich SMS protocol).

RCS will never see widespread use.

It's too tied to phone numbers and mobile devices (have fun getting those RCS messages on your tablet or laptop or when you have no 4G).

It's also too tied to carriers, who might introduce weird billing "RCS messages to abroad cost $$$$". Its also without any end to end encryption, and seems to have an odd 1 or 2 second delay delivering messages which means truly interactive conversations aren't really possible.

Each of those things alone makes it less attractive to one usergroup. Together, I'd guess it'll never see widespread use.

I don't know anyone outside of tech who would care about RCS being tied to phone numbers, being offered through the carrier, or having a delay.

Most people I know (US perspective of course) chat mostly on iMessage and SMS. They'd love RCS.

All of Europe uses Whatsapp and Messenger, with a few fringe countries and groups using Line, Telegram, SMS, Twitter DM's and instagram.

SMS has a delay of 5+ seconds in most of Europe, so isn't really good for rapid fire conversations. Many phones aren't correctly configured for MMS (picture messages) either, and some networks don't yet support emoji.

This has probably been a long term trend as email usage is on the decline and texting is dominant.

The handwriting was on the wall when Google redesigned hangouts to make it look more teen friendly a few years ago, but unfortunately they removed some useful functionality and made it far worse on a smaller (laptop sized) screen.

Google++

No, actually they'll pump out a new platform and name it mobius strip, because...ah, nevermind... :-)

iMessage?

Nah, but most probably by Messenger or WhatsApp, Telegram maybe...

iMessage is for iOS users only, and from Apple. Google has Chats too, so... who knows.

chat.google.com

Google Hangouts Chat - which was released in Feb 2018.

https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

This is not a replacement. This is just Hangouts for business (which is not getting shut down), but if you are not a business user, then you have no replacement.

Tying to leave Google as much as I can (hoping for Purism phone or something else to ditch Android, web part already done) I do not feel the loss...

The real problem is that SFLPhone (now Ring) lost somewhat its way and Jitsi substantially do the same...

I don't know about you but I hated it. Takes ages to open up and is buggy. I have a S8 so you can't say that hardware is a problem. Just low quality Android app.

I still use it because has good prices when calling abroad.

As long as whatever still works and lets me keep those numbers I paid to port in to Google Voice years ago and park so friends and family could forever reach me at the same bloody phone number irrespective of any other BS...

Maybe someone serious can improve XMPP and deploy that.

So they're willing to keep Gmail which isn't cheap to host and develop free but want to shutdown Google Chat?

It feels like this is because Gmail brings in the moolah by making the user to sign in to Google.com, which means all their searches in other browser windows and tabs are tracked to that account leading to user data being collected to be targeted by advertisers.

But they don't want to monetize chat data, either because it's not very useful or because of potential backlash, thus they can shut it down to save costs.

Google needs to focus on their current trend of killing their apps/services. It is surely affecting brand image and value.

Good thing they're giving a year's notice similar to their enterprise SLAs, right?

What will happen to Google voice texting through hangouts?

Can we just all go back to irc already...jezzzz

You don't pay - what do you expect?

Use Threema, Signal or Telegram; likely a more sustainable experience.

You don't pay for those either, what makes you think it will be around in a few years?

Go XMPP, Matrix, SIP - you can self-host these under your own domain, or actually pay for service, or with plain old SMS.

Threema is a paid app.

Signal (Telegram) is open source and the chat is a core service for their providers. I.e. more important than Hangout for Google.

LOL, most of the replies here are about how google fucked up, and sucks at stuff, yet this here HN Frontihspost is a dead-ass PR campaign for their paid work/collaboration tools; hangouts has probably been a technical success, so it's going business class only.

we use https://talky.io/

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