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Comment by jeffnappi | Hacker News Reader

It's so unfortunate that Google couldn't stay focused and make Hangouts competitive with iMessage. I would guess that the issue stems from Hangouts' legacy code base that harkens back to Google Talk. However, it appears their 3rd(?) attempt to replace it with RCS/Messages is failing once again.

Google engineers if you're listening - FIX AND IMPROVE HANGOUTS AND STOP WASTING YOUR EFFORTS ON NEW MESSAGING PROJECTS

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You can’t get promoted at Google by maintaining an existing product. Only building a new one. (I’ve heard that over and over from friends that work/worked at google).

Yes, this is antidotal...

I have seen plenty of people that work on existing products like Chrome, Gmail, etc. get promoted. I also have witnessed people successfully going from L4->L5 as SWEs without launches. I had to see to believe it, and I have seen it. That said, Google is a GIANT company, and other people might have different experiences.

Disclosure: I work at Google.

It's probably just not as fast as being able to hop diagonally instead of vertically

I think it was back in 2013 mobile communication had peaked. In one app (hangouts) I could: sms/mms/IM/phone-call/video-call using my phone, laptop, or some library kiosk browser in private mode. All of this and the notifications went to all of my devices whether or not my physical phone was powered on or connected. On my actual phone Hangouts would also show all of my local messages and I could merge conversations. Voicemails autotranscribed and you could even have them sent as emails to you. SPAM call filtering was built in. IMs could send images/videos. About the only thing it didn't do was send files (had to put it on Google Drive and share the link manually).

Now 6 years later there is nobody else (free or paid) that offers what Google offered for free in 2013. Google itself has disabled functionality in Hangouts and put out a deprecation notice. The replacement options have been spread across multiple individual app attempts, some of which have already closed down, none of which actually got to the point of replicating the functionality.

Hopefully some service will come along that mimics what I was able to do in 2013, I just hope Google Voice doesn't get gimped before then.

> Google engineers if you're listening - FIX AND IMPROVE HANGOUTS AND STOP WASTING YOUR EFFORTS ON NEW MESSAGING PROJECTS

No don't fix hangouts, help out with matrix.org. They are really offering what nobody else is these days and making huge progress in the short period of time they've been around.

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