The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts | Hacker News Reader

The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

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This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential.

Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.

I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth.

>Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it.

That's just not what Google was back then. It was all about PMs/designers wanting to jump onto the shinest and newest projects and lots of politics were involved to win support/attention/resources from the top management.

This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy".

I once worked at a startup that made the mistake of hiring an entire remote product team from silicon valley. All they did in the year before they mass resigned was inject drama and politics into everything and force some really bad design decisions that will quite possibly kill the company in a year or so. Got me thinking what it must be like at scale.

> This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy".

Interesting, because it seems (from the outside) like that was what Microsoft was like internally for years. Blogs like mini-ms seemed to confirm some of that, but of course that was "just one side" of the story.

This happens in every company that employs the Vitality Curve method for employee performance metrics. It ensures only highly visible projects are incentivized, regardless of their actual value added. You are promoted under such systems by merely paying lip service to your manager's assignments, and instead spending your time creating some widget, and exaggerating its usefulness non-stop until someone in upper management buys into your self-promotional hype. "I don't care if the world doesn't need this, it's going on my OKR's dammit!" Your product is green-lighted, and you get a promo. Then your product is pulled some years later futher pissing off your users. Try to operate in an environment like this without affecting the morale of your colleagues though. Go ahead, I'll watch. After dealing with such systems for over a decade I've learned I don't actually enjoy playing Game of Thrones every quarter with my co-workers.

This is a great behind the scenes view.

What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).

G+. The slogan at the time was "one unified Google" -- to I think rightfully correct a mistake that Google had a very diverse set of products many of which did not properly interact.

As I understand it, GChat wasn't seen seen as able to integrate well into G+. So Hangouts was built on the G+/social infrastructure.

To that team's credit they did somewhat seamlessly move users over from GChat to Hangouts without many hiccups.

Of course, after the G+ effort disintegrated... we got Allo & Duo

Social was the department that was running Google+ and Hangout, and at one point I think Youtube fell under its control as well? Vic Gundotra was the SVP who ran it. Despite my mixed feelings toward products from Social I had a lot of respect for Vic.

Social needed features for G+ and success in social was seen as important (everyone's bonus was tied to it). So Hangouts became a G+ headline feature despite having very little to do with social.

What is a PM? I am getting insight into how google works because this sounds like a bunch of idiotic internal wars between acronym teams instead of focusing on making actual useful products.

> focusing on making actual useful products

A 'product' is something you sell to clients.

Google's only product is advertising, and they don't need to focus on making better advertising because they are a monopoly.

Everything else Google does is just a smokescreen for investors and a creeping fear that they won't be able to exist in a post-monopoly world.

PM is a super heavily overloaded term that you'll run across in pretty much any company larger than small, definitely not specific to Google (disclaimer: I work at Google and don't speak for the company, but I'm brand new so my conception of the categories comes from what I've seen elsewhere). Engineers tend to raise an eyebrow at the entire job category because they're thinking of bad experiences with one particular flavor of PM (and often a particularly poor specimen at that), but that can be unfair, a lot of what they do is absolutely critical to business.

The acronym simply means either product manager, project manager, or program manager, but the responsibilities can be any/all of the following, and probably more, depending on the company:

- Full product owner, "the buck stops here" person. Many different possible titles here other than PM (usually "project manager" if that's the title), like general manager (GM), different flavors of producer, product owner (PO), VP of X, etc.

- Feature designer/owner/manager (product manager): writing specs (junior), pitching specs (mid-level), setting and selling product vision (senior), driving strategy (staff/exec, though at that level all roles start to get blurry). Decent business school grad representation here, you have to be good at strategy, negotiation, communication, and Powerpoint; having good product ideas helps a lot, too, but not if you can't sell them. A persuasive PM of this type is a force to be reckoned with and will get a lot of executive attention, which can be very good or very bad depending on whether the strategy they're into pans out or not. This is probably the type of PM the parent was talking about "armies of".

- Development director (project manager or program manager): a whip-cracker at worst or an impenetrable shitshield at best, they manage the practicalities of running a project, like project scoping, meeting and managing hard/soft deadlines, handling support, cross-team communications, processes, compliance, etc., often stepping in as an all-purpose guard against randomization so that others can focus on producing the product. Many PMs of this type ended up being the go-to folks for GDPR compliance over the past couple years, so it's not just internal process stuff that they deal with.

- Task checker: can blend into to the development director mentioned above, but at some companies this sort of PM will mainly focus on tracking tasks that are in-progress, getting estimates, watching velocity, and sending reports up the chain. Some devs find this role pointless and annoying, but it really depends on how good they are - if they're solid, they'll find a lot of ways to improve things instead of just tracking them.

- Scrum Master (project manager): Big-S Scrum is falling out of favor so it's not as fashionable to have this title anymore, but within some processes a similar role still exists as a type of project manager. In a nutshell, Scrum is a simple yet effective "People Over Process" process that consists of a bi-weekly no-laptops-allowed retrospective meeting where you get the team together to have a free-ranging discussion where everyone feels heard, so that you can all decide together whether the team should estimate engineering tasks in terms of hours or hats. You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats. A more seasoned Scrum Master will also schedule a quarterly retrospective-retrospective where the team discusses a strategy for what guidelines to put in place for the next retrospective so that the team can decide on hats faster and leave more time for the less settled question about whether or not the Fibonacci sequence is the right way to count hats or if a size-based approach will make people feel better supported in their work.

- Monetization designer (product manager): mainly at game companies, PM is often a super different role, probably best described as the profitability-focused counterpart to a game designer. They focus on setting prices, managing game economies, speccing and evaluating A/B tests, inventing loot boxes, etc. Ideally PM and designer would be one and the same, and the game design would be holistic with the monetization, with a designer that has serious Excel/analytics chops and deep inspiration and sensitivity about gameplay, but that's a more rare combination than you'd think, so a lot of companies split them out.

I'm probably missing some other ways this acronym is overloaded, but I think this covers most of it.

Could also be Product Manager.

Product Manager.

I believe PM is for Project Manager

Project Manager

project manager

Not OP but I assume project managers

Project manager. Pretty standard role in a software team. The person who determines what the end result should look like.

I've experienced this politicking time and time again. Ultimately these decisions kill great products and drive customers away.

For the record, project managers aren't the problem. Google having no clue how to hire good product managers is the problem. This is why Amazon doesn't have problems like this, our PM's really are world class. But our obsession with mid-level managers is getting out of hand, so I suppose we're all headed in the same direction.

that's how it starts. first the middle managers, then good engineers leave because of said middle managers. then middle managers hire troves of contractors to justify their jobs. then contractors who knows where the bodies are buried become the new engineers. and then you have a Google.

Want to know an even more stupid rebrand?

A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.

There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it.

The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough.

Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.

Our team was in exact same situation. Chat is still missing some features, but I definitely prefer it over HipChat already. Still a compromise in comparison to Flowdock or even Slack, but it gets the job done.

To be fair, in Slack I also miss important conversations when they happen in threads while I'm not looking.

A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more.

For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more.

Discord, Slack, ... are all only a mean to keep abandonware live for business purpose and, unfortunately, many companies fell in the grave. People who want productivity should rediscover classic software, modernized to actual "graphic style" but nothing more so:

- good desktop MUA (I can, unfortunately, only list notmuch-emacs, mu4e, mutt, pine) instead of limited and limiting webmails. Of course we have to add few things to the mix like having our mails in a local maildir and a good filtering/autorefile/autotagging solution (alot, IMAPFilter);

- good VoIP desk/softphones, something like old sip-communicator (now Jitsy);

- decent software to share screen as needed (actually I know only proprietary one's like bomgar, anydesk or teamviewer, xpra etc are simply too limited);

- local, well integrated, productivity suite. Mine is Emacs, not easy to convince office guys to learn it, but even ancient plain office suite can do the business with a decent DMS that enforce good taxonomy and have decent full-text search (YaCy for search, nothing for DMS in my list... They are all crap)...

That is almost exactly what Microsoft did with Skype.

I guess Google really is turning into Microsoft!

> half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.

So, to compete with Skype for Business?

I'm also one of those that was / is still sad about losing XMPP integration. Highly customizable alerts are borderline essential if you have a lot of threads going, but hangouts seems determined to prevent you from doing any of that.

Yes. Their explanation also didn't make much sense since Hangouts was targeted for a while to consumers. But what I got from this is basically:

Messages <-> iMessage

Duo <-> Facetime

Hangouts <-> Slack

I think they should rename the Hangouts to something completely different. That at least will increase clarity for consumers and businesses.

This mapping isn't correct. Hangouts does all of the above - video chats, voice chats, text with emojis, pictures and videos.

Hangouts is also integrated with Google Voice and GMail. So when someone calls my GV phone number, it rings on my cell phone and in any open GMail tab (but not in the GMail app). I get an SMS, it pops up as a hangouts message too.

It is a mess, but trying to kill Hangouts is insane, it's deeply integrated and it's extremely convenient to use.

>it pops up as a hangouts message too.

Unless you have google voice installed instead of hangouts. It manages to be two apps still.

This is what happens when there isn't an unified company product strategy but fiefdoms duplicating and fighting with each other.

I think there's another way look at this. Per "Zero to One" Google is a very powerful monopoly. It wants to protect that position, as well as make it less noticeable.

All these "side projects" create the illusion that Google is not a monopoly. More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new.

While this might sound a bit extreme, even if it's not actually true (in tandem) both of these "incentives" are real. Google does need to mask its dominance. And it does need to attract top talent (if only to keep soneone else from acquiring it).

> More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new.

Is that really true? I would personally chose to work on Facetime than Google's new messaging system, all else being equal.

Facetime is really solid and I'm sure I could learn a ton from the expertise there; as well as working on something new within that product.

In contrast, Google's messaging systems just seem like a mess. I would feel like it could be cancelled at any time, that we didn't have the best talent (because it's spread across the various systems) and honestly would be slightly embarrassed to talk about it ("yeah, I know, yet another message system from Google").

Is no one in charge of marketing or strategy in Google? Surely you can rewrite all the code underlying the product you like, forklift replace it if you want. But why endlessly rebrand existing products. Just keep the brand going. Or converge/consolidate branding even if the underlying software might be different between target markets, like Microsoft did with all its different messaging platforms over time. Now it’s Skype. And Skype for Business. (They’re very different.)

I agree with you 100% and if you analyze the comments on HN everytime Google decides to mess around with their IM, I have seen similar sentiment around Gtalk. I was a regular user of Gtalk during college days 10 years ago and was pissed when they merge/transition them into hangouts. It is a poor product management decision driven by Google's philosophy of capitalizing the next big trend in the internet industry ignoring the preferences of their users.

The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words.

Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop.

Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.

Same. I adore hangouts, ugly and 'outdated' as it is. With Fi/Voice, it integrates perfectly as to call or text from any internet device. And who cares about wifi calling or volte support when with hangouts, everything is over data always and more reliable. Killing it is a mistake. It's the only Google product I'd gladly pay a monthly fee to use...

> I adore hangouts, ugly and 'outdated' as it is

How is hangouts ugly or outdated? I've heard this from several people and I don't know to what y'all are referring.

I have no particular love or hate for hangouts, I'm just curious.

Just from its looks, mainly on mobile. It's got a large, dull green banner that just says 'Hangouts'. I'm no UI expert, but it just looks outdated...

Hopping from text to video in a single click is cool...

But the #1 thing that stops me from even considering buying an Android device is "it's not iMessage".

iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic. No hassle at all and I can blue bubble send perfection to any other iPhone-r. It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly.

I think that's what is really missing. People don't mind opening another app to place call / facetime / hangout video. They want simple, clear phone messaging that isn't an "app"

That's basically Hangouts. I sms more from my computer than my phone but it's all synced everywhere. I'm even smsing with a co-worker from my tablet right now.

Your "That's basically Hangouts" arrangements statement is true when it comes to:

>It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly.

But as for Hangouts being flawless messaging and not just some buggy app, I have to disagree.

Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.

Clearly that aren't doing something properly and I feel quality of the app has degraded as their efforts go elsewhere, viz. Allo, messages, etc.

Hangouts is flawless on the browser on my laptop though.

Agreed, and it was even better before they reduced a lot of the functionality for non Fi users.

iMessages integrates really well with os x...

"iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic."

I don't think i got what you are saying... What do you mean automatic?

I suspect they mean that once you've logged in with your Apple ID, which is pretty much required to use an iOS device beyond the stock apps, iMessage and FaceTime both get set up.

So, if setting up a phone for nana, you take it out of the box, set her up with an Apple ID, put it back in the box, send it to her, she takes it out of the box, and then you call or text her, all she has to do is answer the call. No futzing with downloading the right app, no having to make sure the person on the other end is using the same chat service; just doing it.

you message somebody, and they get the message. you don't have to think about what app you're using or what app they're using.

Sounds like the Unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well."

More than one billion people on whatsapp disagree with you.

That's not really implied. I'm also on Whatsapp (to communicate with Android users) but I agree with every word in that comment.

[removed]

Why did you let your employer effectively commandeer your personal phone number?

Don’t let a company use your personal Apple account... nothing new there.

not an imessage problem but a your employer problem. you know the spiel that chrome puts up when you open an incognito tab?

> blog post is very confusing at best

Yeah, there's clarity at the end, but there could have been a cartoon in 4 frames:

Frame 1: icons of Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Messaging

Frame 2: Hangouts splits into Meet and Chat (5 things)

Frame 3: Duo, Messaging, Meet annd Chat arranged in a 2x2 grid of (messaging, phone/video) x (consumer, business), with Allo still hanging above

Frame 4: Allo getting squeezed into Messaging.

You're onto something. This should be a chart though, and encompass the whole scope of Google's attempts at messaging over the years. Plot out all the bundling (Hangouts & G+) and unbundling (Allo's features -> Messages) like xkcd's movie narrative charts: https://xkcd.com/657/

At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.

https://robots.thoughtbot.com/analyzing-minards-visualizatio...

Based on one of the most famous visualizations of all times - Napoleon's 1812 invasion of russia

Don't forget Talk and Voice

(Googler also, also unrelated product)

I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed over time. Also, it's important to distinguish Allo from Hangouts from the account perspective. Allo is phone # tied, like WhatsApp/Telegram. So definitely trying to go after a different market segment. It just failed.

Duo continues to be awesome. Being a FaceTime competitor that is cross-platform is great. No account needed, just simply start a video chat from your address book (or from the App).

Hangouts is... something special. There are clearly reasons things happened the way they did. But I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.

Allo is an awful product that should never have been greenlit. It was a huge step back on Google's core mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessibleand useful." Not only could you not search your chat history from other devices, but you couldn't even use it from other devices at launch, and even when that was fixed, it was clunky.

Much better would have been to attach phone numbers to Hangouts, similar to how iMessage ties phone numbers to Apple IDs.

Allo was so unpolished compared to whatsapp/telegram att it was hilarious,you def drank the koolaid too much. every indian i met treated it with disdain.

I'd love to hear why you think it was unpolished. I've talked with a number of people (both Googler's and other tech people) that liked the product (at least where it was going).

My problems with it were:

* It used the "phone is the source of truth" like Whatsapp, but it didn't go with always-on encryption (so they could do Google assistant in it).

* They didn't launch with a desktop web client, which it eventually got (and I really like it).

* It didn't launch with any kind of backup/restore system, though it eventually got it (so you could move to new phones).

Things I liked:

* Encrypted chats (incognito mode) worked well and had expiring messages.

* The Overall UX/UI for the mobile app and Desktop are (in my opinion) better than all the other messaging apps out there (except maybe iMessage). (Though I don't use any FB products.)

* It was on iOS and Android, and had the same features on both.

> Hangouts is... something special.

Would you, please, elaborate?

Hangouts integrates your Google Voice and Google Fi texts right into web pages like GMail, contacts, etc.

And this works even if your phone is off, lost, broken, or has no service. Hangouts also works on any device with an internet connection if you log in. You can text and call from your number on literally any device just by signing into hangouts. None of the multitude of other redundant Google messaging products does any of this. Even their official replacement "messages" only works if your phone is on and has service.

You don't even need a phone to call and text from a laptop through GMail from your phone number. That functionality will be lost.

I know too much about it, that I can't say exactly why it's "special", sorry. Most of it would just have to do with internal organizational details.

The below is my take on Hangouts based on it's history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts

It's interesting to remember that it was born out eating multiple existing services (GChat/GoogleTalk, Huddle, and some other things probably). When it launched, it was trying to cleanup Google's fragmented text/video messaging strategy.

One funny thing is how message history search worked. There is no in-app searching history. You can search on the Gmail desktop client and see history, but no where else (no mobile app. Not in Inbox. No-where but gmail desktop).

Along the way they added SMS support for it, which they later scrapped for everyone except Project Fi/Voice customers.

Hangouts has done a lot in the last 5.5 years (since its launch). It may have tried to do too much, which may have caused some problems (especially on usability).

Hangouts Chat and Meet seem to try to start fresh and build a good product focused on business customers. How that plays out for normal gmail consumers has yet to be seen; I'm really hoping they do a good job with it.

What you see as throwing shit at the wall, looks like testing market hypothesis to me.

Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.

Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.

Google has been working on chat for well over a decade. At what point do they stop "testing market hypothesis" and build the product people want to use?

I don't want to be a Google tester (market or beta), and certainly not for years on end. I don't care about "opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on". Just build one good chat system.

In the areas where Google excels, they didn't get there by applying this throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy. The design of Google Search wasn't the result of 13 years of betas. What do you do when nothing sticks?

If they can stumble around for this long and still feel the need to test half a dozen possible strategies, maybe the correct conclusion is that, unlike Search or Maps, Google doesn't really have anything as a company to offer this product category, and they should just get out and focus on areas where they can contribute.

The right thing isn't that hard to figure out, either.

Build iMessage, but make it work across android, ios, and desktop web.

Google has been testing the market since gchat. Doesnt mean it is working out.

It seems like Duo is working out. It has more than 500m installs, and isn't installed by default, so it's numbers aren't padded the same way Hangouts' are.

Allo, despite being shut down got to about the same size as Signal.

This seems to me the start of what happened to GMail. As for Hangouts, it seems that this announcement suggests that Hangouts is moving to become a primarily G Suite brand.

Messaging: you have what you have now, Messages as a vanilla messaging app Allo and Duo as flavored products focusing on particular features for messaging.

Email: GMail as vanilla Inbox as a GTD-flavored that is having its most used features is being folded back into GMail.

Project fi actually DEPENDS on hangouts.

At some point in the last year, I wanted to jump into the "new chat ecosystem" and so I uninstalled hangouts to break bad habits. The entire phone becomes unable to connect to any network.

I love hangouts, and I wish RCS could just roll into it; but how did project fi end up so integrated?

> Project fi actually DEPENDS on hangouts.

No, it doesn't. In the beginning they strongly suggested that you use Hangouts for SMS on Fi, but they don't require it. I just use Messages on Fi.

Have you uninstalled hangouts, or are you just not using it?

Messages mixes up SMS with chat, exactly what I don't want. SMS messages are usually used for couriers notifying about delivery, and spam. I use an SMS-only app on Android to make sure things don't get mixed up. I don't need SMS junk in my chats.

Somehow, I wonder if google is “just” very strong at analyzing vast amounts of data, but weak on core product development. Do they ask questions like who is this for, who will use this, for what purpose, how will they use it etc?

It definitely seems Google is bad at Product Design, but certainly they do not lack for the best talent, so is the problem based upon the structure of the org, stakeholders, something else, both, neither?

It's lack of vision. There are not many in the company who strives for the best product, or have the vision to make a change. As the company got larger, people started caring for more about career and less about great products. People who solve for some director's problem got promoted over the ones who truly deserved it.

Unfortunately, some of the smartest people i know now also looks down on google. This one kid that was an intern for me at MIT (whom i think was way smarter than i am) didn't even bother interviewing with google, he went to spacex.

I honestly have no idea what this means for fi. We were made to move over to Hangouts so we could sms from Gmail or something and now it seems to be going away?

Bummer, isn't it? That was my favorite feature to be honest.

I think there's a lack of connection between Fi and google's other chat products (or even just hangouts and fi) in terms of roadmaps and so on. Fi graduated, now hangouts going away seems a bit... reverse.

I'm pretty sure this blog post was forced due to the recent articles about Hangouts and Allo on 9to5google.com [0], [1].

Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution.

If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...

[1] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/

SMS is still huge in the US, especially because of iMessage integration

Yeah I still use it. I never used a messaging app post gtalk. So many different platforms, it just became a nightmare.

I am still after a lovely opensource cross-platform simple distributed secure messaging and video platform.

I'd read that Allo was being abandoned for Messages. And I'd never heard of Duo until this post. Very confused naming and products at Google. I was trying to get my head around the differences between Play Music and Youtube Music yesterday - a case in point.

> Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person

Isn't that recursive thinking? No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.

> I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol

I'm curious, but could RCS be interchangeably used both through provider and through a host such as Google? Could Google not host their own RCS backend?

> No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.

You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.

" more expensive almost everywhere outside the US."

It's (sms/texting) free (http://mobile.free.fr/) and unlimited on a 2 euros monthly phone subscription with 2 hours of voice communication in France. That makes it the cheapest way to communicate at all, here. Cheaper than voice and much cheaper than internet data. Even the absolute poorest of the country can use texting. It's more accessible than DATA driven apps and can run on dumb phones.

It's also very unreliable if you're messaging abroad. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If you're roaming and so is the other person, it becomes even trickier. At least data works and within the EU is pretty much free.

It doesn't matter why, the fact of the matter is that no one uses SMS in these places, which is also true wherever I've lived.

People use Whatsapp primarily, or facebook messenger, or (in my bubble anyway, not so widespread) Telegram. These products have the network effect already established, and no one is likely to go back to crappy SMS, even if it is dressed up.

>No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.

No, noone uses it because it doesn't use data. I walk into a supermarket and lose signal so I can't SMS anymore. I can use the wifi to send messages even without signal.

Yes, I know there are SMS over Wifi apps, but they're proprietary and usually require signal to enable.

I don't use Android's Messages for SMS, I installed a special-purpose SMS app specifically to avoid mixing Internet-based messages with SMS-based messages. I have zero interest in intermixing the two.

Other articles have indicated that Google is going the RCS route because they don’t want to rock the boat with mobile carriers, who do not want to see a proprietary chat system like iMessage on their networks.

Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.

Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations.

Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like.

I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.

Could be worse. They could have named it "Chill"

Shhh! Don't give them ideas!

IRC is the most consistent and stable, just saying ;)

Its WhatsApp expect for Americans users i suppose.

I've been in many come-to-Jesus meetings wherein Leadership acknowledges their strategic failures, then busts out a presentation detailing the New Strategy, consisting of mild tweaks of the Existing Strategy.

Mild tweaks are great because they spare Leadership the pain of making hard decisions.

> And by refocusing on Messages and Duo for consumers and Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team collaboration

"Instead of working on five products, we're 'refocusing' down to four products." Right.

This has the stench of a post-faction justification that expertly avoids stepping on too many toes. IME Leadership gets axed by Senior Leadership not too long after.

They also fail to address Google Voice, their VOIP/SMS-OIP app. Here's to hoping they don't cancel it down the line too.

What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete them.

Signal and Allo actually have a similar number of installs, they're both in the 10-50m installs bucket in the Play store.

I use Signal, but it's fine at best, but it's not really going to break out of it's niche.

I can't deal with how signal desktop works. I DO NOT want messaging tied to my phone. I want it tied to an account that works wherever I sign in. I'd love to use Signal, but can't deal with that.

You want XMPP or Matrix.

Sounds like what you are looking for is Wire (wire.com).

Desktop/mobile clients. No need for phone to login.

Oh, and server code written in Haskell :)

That doesn’t count all of the iOS people that also use Signal. I use Signal and Apple Messages and didn’t even know Allo existed. I have a perhaps irrational fear of using messaging from Google or Facebook because they have lost my trust.

Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?

> Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?

This is definitely where I'm at. I presume this is all about internal warring fiefdoms, because from the outside it makes no sense.

Why do people ever switch chat apps? Besides shutdowns, it's because the new app does something the old one doesn't. Signal's pitch was easy encrypted messaging, but now there are apps that fill that slot, even Facebook Messenger has e2e encrypted chat, so there's not a lot of reason for Google to invest there.

Google Duo has succeeded as an app known for making video calls, which is as much a marketing/positioning achievement as it is a technical one.

There are lots of people declaring they will use a Google product in this thread, but of course no one is going to use a nonexistent product that people imagine as a clone of what already exists. Unless Google finds an "in", they're not going to get anywhere, even with whatever perfect app HN imagines.

It's not really fair to compare installs when Signal doesn't have the free marketing that comes with being a product created and pushed by Google.

I have it plugged into SMS so for me it also works for people who haven't upgraded from SMS yet

What I love about Signal is their philosophy of "if it's not user friendly, nobody will use it, therefore it won't help anybody."

It's kind of like how Apple will combine security updates with stuff like new emojis: to increase the incentive for the general populus to update.

I sometimes compare Signal to iMessage, except it's cross-platform and private.

signal on desktop it's next to useless and good luck sharing pictures through signal, which it's basic functionality they haven't fixed for years, who is fine with sharing pictures one by one? what is this 90s?

and PulseSMS is run by a single person, and it's excellent.

I saw the title and thought: "Finally, they're going to admit to what a mess they've created and propose a way forward". But nope, just a PR fluff post.

FAQ: how start a video call using Google products?

Answer: Go to Gmail and send an email to the other party "can you Skype now?".

Literally. I had to schedule a video call recently by email. There is simply no formulation to schedule a video call using the name of one of google's products.

"Can you Hangout tomorrow?", "Can you Duo tomorrow", "Can you chat with Allo tomorrow?".

Nothing would work without confusing the other party with some probability. "Can you Skype tomorrow" always works, with everyone, no confusion.

To which many would reply, "Yes, I can Skype with you. I am at work, so I'll be using my Skype for Business program which recently replaced Lync. My Skype will talk to yours, right? Oh it says here that Skype for Business (which used to be Lync (which used to be Office Communicator)), is now Teams, so uhh can you just call me on my phone instead. Thanks

Skype for Business and Teams are not the same app. That said, I've found Teams very lacking in exactly the way Skype is not, and Skype lacking in exactly the way Teams is not which is very frustrating.

SfB is deprecated, and Teams is designated its replacement.

Creating a google calendar event with an embedded link to a hangouts room works pretty well in my experience.

Second this. Clicking on the add hangouts link is dead simple and does exactly what the OP wants

i don't think OPs problem is the product itself, just the name. he wants a verb-able product name like Skype.

personally, i just go with "can we talk tomorrow" instead of "can we skype tomorrow", and leave the choice of app for a follow up. I don't think being able to use the product name as a verb is an essential feature of a videoconference app.

Do we really need to morph the name of every random software product into a verb? "Can you video chat tomorrow?" is plenty short and to the point. Add "on <product name>" if you really need to.

If you are a paying gsuite customer then the answer is meet.google.com (formerly hangouts?)

Despite the rebrand, it works remarkably well. Much better than Skype.

Is this a joke? That whole blog post reads like satire.

Communicating with the people in our lives is one of the most important things we do every day, whether it’s chatting with friends about an upcoming trip, calling mom to check in, or touching base with colleagues.

So when I'm forced to move off hangouts for those connections that I still user over it - what do you think the chances are that I will choose a google product?

Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gaming circles.

Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.

They could... if their own messaging strategy wasn’t almost as bad as Google’s. Skype just got a top-to-bottom redesign that everyone hates, and Teams (which may or may not be the replacement for Lync, or Skype for Business, or whatever it’s called now) is like a checklist of everything terrible about Electron applications: it’s slow as molasses, uses boatloads of memory, and has no integration with the host OS. It’s actually worse than Slack, which is an impressive feat!

There’s something hilariously tragic about this being the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to deliver Google a coup-de-grace on messaging, and they can’t do it because they’re just as incompetent.

I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.

Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.

Try https://preview.web.skype.com/

It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)

When in doubt, use the desktop version. To be honest, its a very simple decision in the windows world, and I'm not sure what tripped you unless you're nee to windows.

It really doesn't work well. I tried making a simple call with web skype with my parents the other day; neither them - android tablet - nor me - linux desktop - could accept the call when video was on by default. We couldn't turn video on if we initiated a voice call either, because it immediately crashed and stop the call.

We ended up using appear.in without a glitch.

... captioning?

You mean, Speech-To-Text that gets forwarded to the NSA, otherwise used by Microsoft for who-knows-what while the transition to an ad company with Win10 ?

Sounds great, but I don't think that's going to be a good alternative for the people who are looking to dump Facebook/WhatsApp/Google over privacy concerns.

Yep, that one!

Useful for people that are deaf and hard of hearing....

skype feels too slow for casual messaging. WhatsApp is the best solution right now - both messaging and video/calls.

I don't know anyone who uses it as their casual messaging client, and I've never used their mobile app. But looking at it now it looks decent, and if they wanted to they could probably match their competitors pretty quickly, if they're not already. The rest is mostly marketing, I'm thinking they could use their reputation as a reliable long term partner to their advantage, and maybe promise to not use peoples contacts to sell ads.

Skype is basically dead at this point, and Microsoft is instead focusing efforts towards its Slack competitor.

Only dead for business, MS is still heavily invested in Skype and just released a major update on all platforms.

Last time I had the Skype app installed it was trying to clone Snapchat and crashed when I tried to message someone. Admittedly that was a while ago, but I'm not sure where they were trying to go with it.

While we are a Google shop for the most part when it comes to messaging, we use Skype for colleagues in China or when traveling there. It is far better quality compared to Hangouts in the Great Firewall.

Discord has eaten skype's lunch. there is no market left to revive too. Skype feels painfully outdated to use in comparison

How are they still getting this wrong.

One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.

I don't think the problem is even one app. They should have had a central board where people set interoperability standards then they can build multiple apps. As long as hangouts could talk with Allo etc it doesn't matter and people can use the one they prefer and it's irelevant to another person's descion.

Now Google have dug a deeper hole as there is little change any tech influencer is going to use or promote Google messaging apps to their circle.

Personally I'm available on Signal, Skype and WhatsApp and it's going to take a hell of a change to make me care about trying something else.

It's so many things Google can't decide what they want. Almost all their Google services are login-based. Your gmail login works on search, on youtube, on calendar, on anything really. Yes. On Hangouts too. But not Allo/Duo. Someone thought it would be hipper to throw that out the window and have people use their phone number instead. Cool. Sure. But why make that the only choice for almost a year?

It's like nobody at Google uses an iPhone or has heard of Facetime. "Oh look, there's an app that lets you call and at a tap of a button turns that call into video! I wonder if we should do something similar?" "- nah, that would be too easy."

I've had that for 10 years with google. I don't understand. I look at a contact while in gmail, click on it to go to hangouts and click the video call button.

It really is that simple. It's really shocking that a company like Google has failed over and over at this. Apple nailed it on the first try. Both iMessage and FaceTime.

What's more frustrating is that Google had Google Talk. It was super successful and really well liked. Rather than maintain and improve it, they threw it away.

I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal.

In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be.

I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.

And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.

And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.

And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...

On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.

I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said.

What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)

EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp

This is the brilliance of iMessage where it gets critical mass- fallback to SMS but pushing the iMessage identity tied to an account that follows you to new phones/devices.

I think that iMessage network effect is a big reason for the steady market share growth of iPhone in the US- none of the competitive apps have cross-generational appeal, just iMessage.

I agree with you, but a hardware specific messaging app is just stupid.

As you can tell by the length of my last post, thinking about this situation has got me upset.

So upset, that right now I've decided to launch a non-profit, open collective organization called OOMA. Only One Messaging App.

OOMA will be comprised of the millions of people who are annoyed and upset at the result of tech companies competing for our communication. We are taking things into our own hands. We are agreeing to switch to ONE service, for ALL of our messaging needs. All of us, all over the world, all at once.

We are going to do 5 things, in order: 1. Choose a switch date. 2. Define a spec for the "perfect messaging app" (encryption, licensing, finance model, features, tech, etc.) 3. Invite companies to pitch their app, and/or secure funding to develop our own to spec. 4. Spread the word. 5. Make the switch.

I'm going to prepare a marketing web page and (ironically) a discord server right now. At the very worst it's a fun side project and way to express my anger.

EDIT: OOMA server is live. If you think an app is not the solution, come tell us why: https://discord.gg/CmdgUp

> a hardware specific messaging app is just stupid.

What's the old phrase? If it looks stupid but it works, its not stupid. Say hello to the world's most valuable public company and what is commonly regarded as the world's highest quality messaging network.

A truth technologists hate hearing: You cannot, under any circumstances, solve problems created by code by creating more code.

XKCD has a comic for just this situation: https://xkcd.com/927/

Ooooh - the worlds biggest bikeshed ;)

Wouldn't a federated solution be better though? After all email and SMS are decentralized, albeit somewhat archaic.

If email and SMS was invented today, they wouldn't be open and decentralized. Everything is locked and centralized nowadays, since everything is tied to accounts at companies wanting to make money of of you. It's the current state of the Internet, a world wide open network with siloed incompatible services.

I'm actually contemplating ICQ, it's still around and looks no worse than any other service. Matrix might be a better solution though, it's federated and open. https://matrix.org/blog/home/

sorenjan referenced matrix...and honestly, that's the way to go.

Until you find the ultimate solution (good luck), here's my practical solution:

1) Port your US number to Google Voice for a one time fee of $25 ; from now on, you can use this number to forward to your new verizon number (also: T-Mobile had much better plans for only a few months at a time, every single time I checked).

2) Get service in Europe from an Illiad affiliated phone company; At least in the past, that included free US numbers you could forward your US google voice to freely -- as well as 15-45 days of free US roaming service. Maybe these offers are gone now - you could just pay $1/month or so to LocalPhone or a similar company to do that forwarding for you.

3) Buy the cheapest Android handset running a recent version (for security updates); I got a new Meizu m6 for ~$90, you could probably go lower for 1st hand or get a 2nd hand at $40 or so.

4) When travelling, switch SIMs between main phone and cheap phone, set up forwarding (directly if included in plan, or through LocalPhone or similar if not), and keep cheap phone on WiFi only, plugged in charging at home, and mostly accessible for when needed.

5) Use WhatsApp web on the new phone to continue using old WhatsApp number. Less than ideal - messages don't pop up - but it works well.

For about $100 one time[0], and about $1/month or so, you could to keep both numbers fully functional and working indefinitely.

[0] Ok, so you'll have to upgrade the cheap phone for security reasons every few years. So not exactly one time, but possible $20/year amortized, or free if you don't trade-in your old main phone and just let it rot like many people do.

What’s wrong with iOS Messages? I can text literally everyone I know. I don’t even know what it does under the hood.

It's hardware specific! Most of the planet is on Android. If there is a way to do iMessage on Android, I can at least say that not many people know how.

I think that's where Google Messages is headed unless they somehow decide to put it on other app stores.

The only “green” people I know are google employees and my mom, who can’t afford an iPhone. The solution is simple to their problem- buy an iPhone.

It’s almost like the iPhone is a fetish or totem that grants access to iMessage (although you can message from macos or iCloud.com impractically).

It’s quite strange how this is a very simple, solved, problem for iPhone for many years. Google can fix it by literally cloning iMessage and arguing with carriers. They don’t. I suspect it’s because they want to be the only one with access to the cleartext and they aren’t willing to make a consumer-focused decision to keep all messages ciphertext.

So “most of the planet” has to suffer Google’s anti-consumer decision.

And if your "Only One Messaging App" is a monoculture proprietary product with dubious profit goals than you can count me, and large swaths of tech minded people, out.

The only way forward is either Matrix or something like it. And even then you need enough momentum to bend all the walled gardens of Google / MS / FB / etc to have to play ball with a common federated protocol. Good luck getting that without the ludicrous budgets the market leaders have to throw at trying to force everyone into their own proprietary chat bubble.

We almost had that in the mid 2000s and the Google jumped ship first to Hangouts. They basically started this whole mess by going from a time where MSN Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk were all speaking the same XMPP language. Since then all three have gone total proprietary with design decisions around locking people in than providing a useful product.

Some things are fine to have proprietary giants trying to fight for your eyeballs over, such as entertainment. But communication should be something we can agree on, as a society. This is the kind of thing we should have international interoperable standards on. Email was a lucky break that SMTP and IMAP ended up being mandatory, because even today Google is trying their damn hardest to implement Gmail in anything other but an interoperable way but know it would destroy their product to ever turn the compatibility off.

I agree. But I can think of two alternatives that you don't mention:

1. A centralized and proprietary system, but with a transparent and non-profit governance structure. I understand the costs and technical challenges of global communication are bigger than say, wikipedia... but is it impossible?

2. The power of collective action. Communications apps don't put users first because we have no bargaining power. What would they do for us if we threatened to leave, en-mass (or vice versa, if enough people offered to collectively adopt their solution?).

And honestly, the problem might be better approached as a personal, social one: I don't care what the world uses, how do I get my social and professional circle to adopt one single solution?

This is more what I have in mind with "Only One Messaging App". We've grown 800% in the last quarter, so keep an eye out for us :P

I worked around the problem you describe by getting a google voice number and using that at the front end for my real numbers. My GV# is the face for whatsapp, telegram, whatever asks for my number. Also helps that I can send and receive sms over data or WiFi anywhere in the world.

Doesn’t work with some sms gateways that don’t y’all GV, but the best international I know.

Each country gets a new sim with a local number for data and local texts but I never give it out.

I tried this a few years ago, it only worked for American customers. But it did save me some money making calls. Last I checked they basically abandoned their mobile app for a near decade...

The mobile app is poor, but can send texts and push text alerts to me.

I think GV is limited to US numbers and you have to have a US number to sign up.

It places a burden on my contacts who want to send an sms because they have to use international rates. But it’s better than not being able to text me.

The GV app is usable again recently - it was never really abandoned, just not given any major attention for a while. It did lose the "call back" option, which is a bummer.

However, installing the Hangouts client will let you use it as a better GV app for every day use (messages/voice, for settings and stuff you still need the GV app or the GV website).

At least until Hangout dies ...

So... this?

           | Text     | Video
  Business | Chat     | Meet
  Personal | Messages | Duo

I guess that makes a lot more sense... I just wish I knew why four separate apps are needed in the first place.

Why can't text and audio/video be supported in the same app? Skype, Hangouts, HipChat (RIP) and many other messaging programs have been doing it for ages. It's simple and intuitive.

The Hangouts Chat/Meet split is particularly confusing. Aside from supporting more people in a call, I really don't understand what makes a Meet call better than the old Hangouts calls. My confusion is only compounded by Google's continued support for calls on the old Hangouts (now "Hangouts Chat"?).

Is there really such a big difference between an enterprise chat service and a personal one? Companies were turning to Hangouts long before Google announced it would become an enterprise-focused service.

HipChat (RIP) and Slack have obvious enterprise features that would seem out-of-place in a personal chat app... but Hangouts doesn't have any such features. It became popular without them. Why change your development focus all of the sudden? Why not continue marching towards a unified communications app and let the enterprise customers just do their thing?

I'm sure, given proper context and information, most of the decisions leading up to this point make sense in isolation. Still, Google really needs to sit down and figure out where they want all these apps to be in 5 years because - though I'm far from the first (or last) to say it - this is a mess.

'Chat' supports 'Rich Communications Services' (RCS), the protocol that will replace SMS.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8dneie/do_you_believ...

I count six different apps here:

Allo

Duo

Messages

Hangouts

Hangouts Chat

Hangouts Meet

I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up?

This is ridiculous.

Chat & Meet are for businesses, and Allo is ending. So the vast majority need to only keep up with 3.

There’s a Googler in here who wrote a comment on this post: “I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.”

I just don’t know. I’m at a complete loss for words on how Google can screw this up so badly.

We actually use Hangouts every day for our business. I have been advocating a move to Slack.

We found we got a nice boost in call quality when we moved to from hangouts to slack. zoom.us is also good.

Don't forget the native Android SMS app.

That's Messages

How about having only one app where i can simply use messaging and video? why do i need to install 4 different apps for it?

Because they gave 4 different people a promotion

give another promotion to the person who will combine all of them.

That's probably exactly what happened.

Why not open the protocol, so I can use the one app for all my cross-service messaging needs?

e.g. Pidgin.

Where's the money in that?

If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.

Yes and no. You can use their Messages web client, but it's still going to be SMS to and from your phone. It's a contrived and pretty ugly solution IMO.

https://messages.android.com/

Good grief. It seems like they are doing everything possible to not make something as good as Apple Messages. Data chat without a phone number, interoperability with conventional SMS and the ability to start an instant FaceTime. And with Group FaceTime, it’s even more compelling. You can even do audio only or start a real phone call or send a video or audio message, all in one place. Other than org politics, I can’t understand why Google messaging services are a convoluted mess. I need a flowchart just to understand it all.

It has to hurt somewhere inside Google to kill Allo but not Duo. I honestly expected the opposite given the original push behind these apps. The problem with all these messaging experiences is that none of them work well on both dekstop and mobile. They seem to be optimized one way or the other.

If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.

Duo has at least 10x more installs on the Play store, it's pretty clear that Duo has succeeded, while Allo has failed.

Duo has replaced Hangouts in the GMS bundle of apps that vendors should ship preloaded [1][2][3][4], while Allo isn't in the list.

[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/10/07/google-is-demoting-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/7/13202866/google-hangouts-... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/72lpsk/how_come_go... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_mobile_services

Does Google have another video calling solution similar to Duo to replace it with?

Hangouts?

Hangout was good but it feels like Google whiteanted this product in the hope people would head to Allo/Duo. While in reality they just pushed people away completely.

I find it amazing how these decisions are made... it seems like most people here could see the train wreck coming from this at the beginning. Are the descion makers that bad? Did no-one have the guts to discuss how bad these things looked or were they arrogant enought to feel they can fly above market sentiment... I always find it interesting how bad decisions are made in such seemingly obvious circumstances.

> telegram like experience

Surely you don't mean fast, cross-platform and saves chat? Because google talk is dead

So the business product is named like a consumer product (Hangouts) and the consumer product is named like a business product (Messages).

I suppose that makes sense in today's upside down world.

Quiet, otherwise google will resolve this by launching two new messaging apps.

You did it, they heard you, Messages is now Youtube Chat and Hangouts has been replaced by a confused looking goldfish.

I should take my timeline of Google's chat fumbles [1] and keep it updated. A lot has happened since. But Allo's stagnation has been known since April 2018 [2], and "classic" Hangouts' decline has long been suspected in light of the new services also prefixed by the same name.

This post seemed like it might cut the BS and explain what's going on, but it's tinged with PR platitudes and is unacceptably unclear and nonchalant about "classic" Hangouts' fate. They're basically saying they'll shut it down soon but not quite yet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16886921

Hangouts once upon a time was an effective iMessage alternative and Google totally squandered what they had.

Several years back the Android version of hangouts:

* could message over hangouts, google voice and sms/mms

* could merge those methods into a thread by person

* was a required vendor pre-install app, if you knew someone’s gmail address and they had android you could reliably send a hangouts message

* it was easy to video call people because most people had hangouts installed

Sure it wasn’t as user friendly as iMessage and FaceTime but the base was there and the ui could have improved to get there.

What a joke of a blog post, and what a joke of a company. This isn’t “the latest.” It’s the latest deprecation, and the latest breach of implied warranty to the consumer.

Oh my god - Google really has the worst product management etiquette in the world.

It’s not hard. Look around you for what works and what doesn’t and copy that.

The post is also confusing and hard to get the bottom line out of it. Just write “we are killing Allo”.

Literally just copy imessage feature for feature, or are they too beholden to carriers to do that?

So basically - "If you need to do video calling, use Duo. If you need to send messages Android to Android use Android Messaging. If you need a cross platform messaging service outside of enterprise use Hango...ooops"

Genuine question here, as I've read both the post and all the comments here and I still can't figure this out: Does this blog post say google's consumer text messaging strategy is now "send an email?"

I read the post as saying Messages is for Android consumer text messaging, Duo for cross-platform consumer video, and Hangouts for enterprise text and video. That doesn't seem to leave anything for friends doing text chat outside of Android.

I think it's more "send an sms". I could be reading this post wrong though.

> "send an sms"

I guess that's better than telling people to fax 8 track tapes, but not by much

When google voice was introduced, I ported my phone number. It was nice to use the service. Before that, I had a grandstream ATA. The service was great.

Now, everyday feels worse. Last month, I was traveling abroad and had more important things to do than to confirm the cellular number linked to voice was still mine. So google decided not just to stop redirecting phonecalls, but also to stop me from calling using the dialer app.

Basically, my "phone privileges" was unilaterally revoked by google because I did not obey the phone number verification procedure.

I have previously checked companies like callcentric, but it is now one of my priority. I can't entrust google with my phone service in 2019.

Callcentric can do sms now if you need that

Interesting, even if they don't have an SMS API yet.

I will have to check again their offer, and see if their native client improved.

At the moment I mostly use them for fax and SIP trunking.

Even if twilio is good, I'd rather now have everything in one place.

I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling?

For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.

https://meet.jit.si/

Never heard of this before, but it looks awesome! Do you know if rooms expire after a certain amount of time? If so I might install it on my server and have a forever running meeting.

No expiration for anything in my experience. It's all OSS, so it would surprise me if there are any awkward restrictions.

https://appear.in/

I've liked using that in the past. They seem to require a login now.

Looks like you need a login to create a room, but not to join one.

Someone at some point in the past has created this one, for example:

https://appear.in/lolbutts

And you can join it as a guest.

Oh no! Used to be my favorite

While it's not bad, it has many features that are paid-only and the UI isn't perfect... but I suppose I was spoiled by Hangouts. Thanks for the tip.

The main reason I still use Google Meet is that appear.in has a full-fat P2P model where your video and audio must stream to every user and vice versa. Even with 4 people that can get pretty taxing on a poor connection.

Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.

which one will be built into gmail in the future?

one of the greatest advantages google has is gmail/hangouts native integration in the browser. if they lose that, i think a good bit of what makes gmail attractive goes with it.

i say this as an iOS user.

It's beyond ridiculous to say 'we failed to gain traction with a free solution that anybody can install on any Android and iPhone and use it TODAY' and replace that with 'but we will succeed in gaining traction with a solution that only runs on a few select phones and need carrier support and where you never know if the person you are trying to message has a compatible device on a compatible carrier".

In what world do Google product people live these days?

I don't understand why can't just Google copy iMessage exactly as it is. They can just tie up the chat app like Hangouts to the Gmail ID and just build SMS and Video functionality into it. And make it available by default. So when I want to SMS, Text, or Video I don't need to "think" which app to use. They can just get rid of their Messages, Allo, Duo, etc and just stick to one default messaging app.

I think the main reason people use hangouts at all is because everyone has gmail open all the time, or at least everyone has a gmail account. It's just laziness for the most part. Not that chat is that hard a problem or that hangouts is so good. If you have to go to newshinymessenger.google.com at any point, the advantage will die.

It's great that they've simplified their story. Totally makes sense now. Texting app and AV app for consumers, texting app and AV app for teams.

But this leaves a giant hole in their consumer texting product. Have they given up on making a private, cross-platform texting product for consumers? Messages seems like it must use an Android phone as the user's primary device – as SMS requires OS integration and presumably RCS does too.

And neither SMS or RCS are private. Carriers have full visibility to all messages. That's light-years less secure than the end-to-end encryption offered by iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, and even less private than the former Hangouts. (Say what you will about Google, I'd trust them with my private messages far more than any pair of cellular carriers.)

GChat was great because it wasn't locking users into Google's ecosystem. People from other platforms could chat with you directly because it supported federation.

With Hangouts they dropped XMPP because supposedly it was preventing them to innovate and because Microsoft and Facebook weren't playing as nice.

GChat was actually successful and I enjoyed it for a long time. I couldn't be happier that all of their other attempts are failing.

The problem with Google is that they've lost what made them special back in the day. What made them great was openness. They were building on top of standards. And nobody complained that their web properties are optimized for their own browser.

Nowadays they just want to lock people into their walled garden. Guess that's what happens when you're no longer the underdog.

1. What is the difference between Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet? Why are they separate products?

2. What is the difference between Duo and Hangouts?

I can answer #1:

Hangouts Chat is a standalone, text chat-only app (chat.google.com), similar in functionality to Slack. It will/does have the ability for third-party developers to create bots, etc.

Hangouts Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" type of communications. Both of these (according to this blog) will only be available to G Suite (enterprise) users.

Why they are separate products? Who knows.

> Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others"

Yeah, no. Meet is the most equal-among-all video conferencing app I've ever seen. It's ability to promote the speaker to the main window is uncannily good. It is my go-to, and I use it intercontinental and inter-org.

They are both available to G Suite - Basic users from start.

1. Hangouts Chat is a text chat app more like slack then anything. Meet is video conferencing like Zoom or Webex. 2. Duo is a video calling app like Facetime or Skype.

One of the absolute top features of Hangouts is indexing chats into your Gmail search results. And yet here goes Google yet again applying the foot gun to a useful feature. Do they buy bullets in bulk or something?

Which, oddly enough, cannot be search on mobile.

I was a user of hangouts for the last 10 years already since a closed for public alpha-beta. It was wonderful product for companies, for teams. It was so easy to create a meeting (because it had an integration with google calendar) invite everyone, add some people phone number to join the same conversation. It just worked and it was the best on the market. Then Google decided to kill this product one by one removing useful features like: conference call, external plugins, jabber support (jabber allowed to easily integrate with other corporate stuff). Finally Hangouts transformed from a must-have-thing into another-chat-app-none-use. I waited a long time, but there's still NO DESKTOP client. I suppose Google believe in mobile first world etc. but REALITY says 99% of corporate work's done DESKTOP. And web based-chat is not a solution at all. Before I can use alternative clients like psy, it wasn't really convenient but it worked well, until it was killed. Death of Hangouts was predictable due to lack attention to the detail and building a wall of ignorance of their users. By the way mobile version hangouts may built on electron because it's the SLOWEST application on my iPhone.

What's really annoying is that they killed off the one thing that was closest to a desktop client [the one seen here: https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extensio...] and had unintrusive windows that could be made floating, or docked/minimzed to the bottom of the screen. It was incredibly productive.

Just use hangouts in a web browser and pretend like its a desktop client. What doesn't work with that?

Google had lost. Nobody cares or dares use their messaging app any more. Deal is done.

The last time I used messages it made a point not to let me chose if I wanted to use SMS vs google own protocol, and I felt I was a weapon for google to bring more users to their ecosystem.

The last time I used hello and duo they needed either a phone or a smartphone or both.

For me a messaging system should not require to have a phone number and should equally well across a range of devices including Linux desktop.

Hangouts and zoom can do it, why would other apps not do it?

Android Messages is just an SMS/MMS/RCS app, it doesn’t have a google account, it uses your cellular carrier.

I use Hangouts as a desktop messaging client to communicate with my Mom. She has a Chromebook, but no Android phone. I also use Hangouts (from my desktop) to communicate with friends via an ongoing chat stream (with the occasional video chat).

My use case seems to be falling through the cracks with Google's new approach. I guess I will be signing my Mom up with a Google Voice number and switching to Skype for for my video chats.

While I'm NOT using anymore Google services I have few sparse world about Google communication services:

- GMail (webui and apps), Hangout (webui&app), Drive, ... skyrocketing their weight in Mb and cpu cycles without addin really anything new in the last few years. Only if we read "changelogs" on Play store there is nearly anytime "bugfix and improvements" so nothing that can justify such size change. Only data mining probably changed.

- What all users I talk about and me want from a communication service is communication and convergence, so decision to separate SMS from hangout, to have a separate app on Android for Hangout calls etc are simply anti-users features I do not know why are created.

- Allo/Duo seems more an experiment to test their users stupidity/reaction, mine was deinstall them the same day I install few days after first availability announcement.

- I know Google is changed recently with the disastrous new direction, but I remark that Google in the past was NOT a philanthropic geek project and it have made big money on users data as it make today, only real change I see is that in the past such "data spill" was recompensed by good and effective services, now services or disappear or remain the same and became pachydermic.

Long story short: dear Alphabet, you are NOT our "alphabet" nor something we can't live without. Personally I discover many new and nice things leaving your services apart. So I think in the near future you will start to loose users and begin suffer "IBM syndrome"/"bureaucratic syndrome" to the last level, seeing your size you probably do not die quickly but certainly you start to loose profit.

Super short version: stupidity has increased super-rapidly but not so rapidly, not at a live someone want.

Why don't they build one chat system that all of these features work with. And when they want to try a new feature, put it as an option on the same app. You don't need to make a new chat app all the time! Pick one, give it a video call option, let it do sms, let it chat with people with google account, make it work with business domains hosted by google. Done!

When and why did Google decide that cloud-first messaging was on the outs, and device-tied messaging was the new hotness?

Because I thoroughly disagree.

I really want to know what is the plan for Project Fi. The Hangouts integration is one of the best aspects of the service

This. If Fi integration with Hangouts goes away without a replacement, I'm cancelling my Fi service and switching to Pinger Textfree Web for text messaging.

"We’ve seen great adoption with both among our G Suite customers."

That's nice. For people I've talked to it would be more accurate to say: we forced users off their old working solution onto this and they didn't quit yet.

Google is discountinuing Allo next year. I have never been affected by one of these decisions by Google since I try to stay away from their ecosystem, but I am confident this is a way to lose user trust.

Lots of money. Lots of ideas. No focus.

I clicked through to the Messages Play store page on my one year old Samsung tablet and it says the app isn't compatible with my device. A replacement for Hangouts this is not.

Do any of their offerings provide end to end encryption by default?

This article is a good summary of all the past and current attempts Google has made at messaging, for those like me who can't keep up. Outside of maybe Google employees, is there anyone who can at this point?

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messaging-apps-86784...

It really just cements the impression that there's absolutely no consistent leadership vision over there.

From any of these 6 Google apps, I should be able to message/voice as appropriate, to users on any of the other apps. Protocol over apps. It's the only way forward.

> Thanks to partnerships with over 40 carriers and device makers, over 175 million of you are now using Messages, our messaging app for Android phones, every month.

It's amazing how low this is for their market share, compared to iMessage which so seamlessly integrated SMS and more-than-SMS years ago. Given that Google do dictate preinstalled apps on Android it's not obvious why they've never managed to clone the iMessage experience.

My takeaway from this post was google saying : We acknowledge that Hangouts, Duo, Allo exist and we think they were orphaned for too long and we are adopting them back. Hangouts to me is like Flash, useful but so out of touch with everyday needs of an ever evolving world and sadly forgotten. I love Google Photos, Duo as well as Messenger (SMS App) and i hope they don't end up in Google's Graveyard sometime soon.

You do realize, Google, that most of us are simply not listening to you any more, on this topic?

Personally, you've burned me too many times, in this domain. I won't be looking at your products, going forward.

(My last phone came with a Duo icon pre-installed on the home screen. I felt an active aversion to clicking it; that persisted, and I never have.)

P.S. In retrospect, killing XMPP inter-operability was indeed a harbinger of the larger sh-t-show.

i remember when i told someone to try allo/duo they laughed in my face and said to stick to whatsapp

I'm not advocating for them, either. But, you make a good point.

Here, I'm saying I'm off the Google IM merry-go-round.

I'm not turning to the Facebook family for a replacement. I've been backing away from them, as well; it was friends who dragged me into their products (Whatsapp, as well as FB proper and Instagram), in the first place.

Between the two, I trust Google more -- with limitations. I might be ok using their IM products to communicate with friends I can't convince to switch to something private, for lower risk communications. But... Google's made a complete sh-t-show out of their IM offers.

So, this is a Google customer -- or, "product" -- saying to them that one more launch won't make any difference. Users have been looking for one launch, then stop and just work on that.

You are looking at the wrong end of the stick. The people repeatedly launching: They're your problem. (Beta and all is fine: I kind of miss the days when it was genuinely so. This is something else, and it sucks.)

Still sounds like waffling to me. Unless they plan on acting now (dropping something tomorrow) I suspect these plans can easily change again. Just as they did through Allo and the last time they tried to differentiate their many competing solutions to the same problem.

Meanwhile, many people are not interested in waiting around to find or figure it out. Plenty of clear and concise alternatives.

Google has clearly got internal problems with their product management. It is a well-known fact that the fewer options you have the easier the choice. Once you have to choose between similar things with intersecting feature sets you find yourself in the center of uncomfortable mess. And there is no one to blame but those who make high level decisions in Google.

The sooner they replace hangouts with something that is fast and more reliable the better.

getting tired of the inconsistencies experienced with hangouts.

Google Meet is the new thing.

If anyone is looking for a video conferencing alternative to Hangouts, I can't recommend enough http://gotalk.to

I have no affiliation and only came to know about them a couple weeks back from a recommendation from someone here.

Is phenomenal. It changed the way I work remote.

I wonder if what they're doing is trying to refine each individual aspect of communication as much as possible in various apps so that later they can merge them all into one massive super-app. So, email, texting, messaging, video chat, voice, all merged into "Google Human" or something crazy.

Hangouts Chat is such a botched launch. It is backwards compatible with single user chat and not group chats. It effectively ensures that people cannot completely migrate to it. The overhead of keeping 2 apps and getting the same notification twice was too much - ended up going back to classic Hangouts.

I may need to read that mess several more times to understand what they're doing, but from what I gather if I just want to do video chat with family with Google stuff, I'll need to use their "Duo" app. Does anyone use that and know if it also works in a browser (preferably Firefox)?

Forgive me for being a bit daft, but:

What do all of these messenger clients and things bring to the table that didn't already exist on AOL instant messenger 20 years ago?

Slack seems like (badly) redone IRC. My computer 20 years ago could run mIRC without issue, and yet my brand new modern macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram chokes on the slack client. WHY?

Hangouts seems like (badly) redone AIM. For some unbelievable reason, since about 6 years ago, I can't quite ever figure out how to open or close the "hangouts" application, and google just keeps making it more confusing.

It started out pretty sane: either use the mobile site in gmail.com, or open the (beautiful, fast, stable) google talk desktop application. Eventually the desktop application got deprecated, and I HAD to use chrome, but that was essentially okay since it had some nice features. It would dock messages to the bottom of your browser, which was cool.

But at some point, google deprecated that, and won't even let you run the old version of it anymore. Now you HAVE to either use gmail.com, or some application that can only seemingly run if chrome (a giant memory hog) is also running. Oh and for some reason the mobile version of the application wants to send SMS messages? But like sometimes it's SMS but sometimes it isn't, an it's not really obvious which is which??!?

All of this messaging stuff is seriously driving me crazy. In what world does it make sense that facebook messenger is somehow the easiest, most stable messaging client? WTF? If we could all just agree to start using AIM again, and if they could get file transfers and voice chat working 100%...my god. It would be amazing. And imagine how fast it would run on modern hardware!

I really don't agree with you

For Slack / IRC: Slack is a much easier IRC: you don't need a bouncer to keep your session open, you can easily send files / images / videos, code snippets, a lot of integrations are baked in and work very well.

For hangouts / AIM: Can you do video chat on AIM ?

Also, for AIM, you still need someone to maintain the server, but I don't think people are ready to pay for chat. And they But why would a company host for free a server for an open protocol like AIM ? Why do you think we don't see more big companies behind it?

Also, I think voice chats work very well with facebook messenger (I don't remember that it worked that well in the golden era of AIM and MSN messenger).

Resurrect wave and rule them all

The best part about Wave was that it was/is federated, so your data isn't completely siloed like basically every other modern app mentioned in this thread. It's more like e-mail. With sufficient resourcing, it could have revolutionized communication.

I heard over the grape vine that wave was killed in political maneuvers of management (as they deliberately did not build integrations into email for wave, thus causing adoption issues).

The tech is incredibly good! It had so much potential, and yet...

I love how they are desperately trying to capture the Slack market now... when they had a product that was perfect for it long before Slack.

Fast forward I/O 2019: Google launches a new (or two) chat platform!

I use hangouts as my primary communication app with my spouse on desktop and android, and have since the google talk days. Will this no longer after the change and if not what is the replacement?

WhatsApp is better than any of this nonsense. It has all the features and more. Hangouts/GoogleTalk was nice. Don’t know what this profusion of crap is for.

Turn your phone off and send a message to someone from your computer. Oh wait...

Huh, I’ve done this before. Don’t know why you’re acting like it’s not a thing.

Now that messages has a web version, I just don't care about anything else. That's all I wanted. Send texts from my computer or my phone.

Well, now everyone know Google sucks in privacy 'cause doing business on users data. I'm not wonder why their ALL messengers failed.

I bet this is a normal A/B test from google and they'd shut one or 2 of these in a couple of years

Quick quiz ? Could someone please let me know what is the new brand name of chat that loads with Gmail Web ?

Google should stop trying to compete in big existing markets and should focus on creating new things.

Whoever at google greenlighted this should have to read this entire thread out loud. Twice.

Perfect example of the organization (different product teams) dictating the product

Just a conplete mess.

Its turned into a massive joke. They can create amazing machine learning and AI systems, can't put together a consistent chat app - stuff thats been around since the beginning of the Internet.

I think that joke must include a dozen highly skilled but poorly socialized engineers in a conference room completely failing to communicate about communicating.

I'm just not sure if it's a comedy, a satire or a tragedy.

this feels very early 2000’s microsoft. not a good look.

Would you like fluff with your PR waffle?

as a xoogler, I wish they would've titled this, "an update on allo".

- @

dumpster fire.

"yeah we realize our messenger offer is confusing, but we are too big of a mess internally so we will keep it confusing. sorry!"

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