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Comment by luigi23 | Hacker News Reader

I think this might be a trailblazing WWDC - when they notice that there are many engineers that wanted to get help, but they couldn’t afford the travel to California. I’d bet that in 2021 there’s gonna be WWDC as usual in San Jose and they’ll delegate some of the staff to support remote engineers. Hell, I’d push for better FaceTime to promote it as a ‘perfect’ replacement for Zoom... Think about it! If I were Craig, I’d move some of the finest engineer to make a really compelling contender for other videochat apps.

You’re green bubble in Messages - out of style.

You’re not using FaceTime for remote call - get out of here...

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zoom works on multiple systems. facetime is apple only. Remember they are a hardware company not software, they use the software ecosystem to force you to buy their hardware

>Remember they are a hardware company not software, they use the software ecosystem to force you to buy their hardware

This is what a lot of people thought and it is actually the other way round, and as Steve Jobs put it himself [1], Apple is a software company, you just have to buy its hardware to use it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs

Hangouts/Meet already works on all devices and OSes.

This is a bit like Swift - it's really only attractive to those in the Apple ecosystem and doesn't acknowledge the world outside of it.

The OP is discussing it in regard to Apple’s developer conference. If there is ever a situation where the audience can be assumed to be Apple centric, this is probably it.

Hangouts/Meet hardly works for me at all, and definitely not in Firefox. It's like the old days when "DOS isn't done til Lotus doesn't run".

It's too bad, too, Hangouts used to be a nice platform.

I use Hangouts Meet on a daily basis with Firefox, and AFAIK everything works. Screen / window sharing, live transcripts, recording, etc. all work fine.

There was a period a few months (over a year?) ago where Hangouts Meet would reject Firefox and tell you to use Chrome, but certainly not anymore.

Hmm, sounds like I need to give it another shot.

It’s definitely failed for me during the current school year (2019-20). Usually the audio fails to come through, or one side of the call gets booted off as soon as the other side joins.

It worked great on Mac in late 2017 and early 2018.

I'm also using a Mac, as are most of my co-workers, and it's fine for us 99% of the time.

If you're on Catalina, be sure to grant the appropriate permissions to FF. You should only have to do this once -- the first time -- but this could explain why audio's not working for you.

Funny enough, Firefox is the application I use to access Hangouts. I usually join Hangouts via their share URLs.

On iPadOS the Hangouts app has, without a single exception, always failed to join the call. Tapping the link to open it in Safari just causes Hangouts to tell me I need to use the app. Manually pasting the link into Safari sometimes works and sometimes shows the same "please use our app" message.

On macOS the camera is black in Safari and provides no image (even though permissions are granted). It shows the little camera icon in the address bar, but the camera LED stays off and I'm not getting a picture. This seems to be a Safari issue in general though, because I just tried a bunch of sites and neither of them worked (but did in FF). So Firefox it is

> when they notice that there are many engineers that wanted to get help, but they couldn’t afford the travel to California

I think the restriction for a lot of these bigger conferences (WWDC, Google's big Android conference) is how many people the physical space can hold. The tickets always either sell out really fast, or they have to hold a raffle for them. So they're definitely aware that there are lots of people who want to attend but are unable.

You shouldn’t forget the people who want to go but can’t afford it (in my country I have to work 3 full months juste for the 1500$ ticket)

I didn't forget about you (well, us)—it's just that, even if they made it more affordable, they still couldn't increase attendance, since their space was pretty maxed out.

But hey it just can't be really compelling if it is Apple device only.

Yep, I'm guessing 90% or more of Fortune 500 companies use Windows computers. FaceTime will only run on MacOS / iOS devices, so even if it was a superior video chat product the exclusivity of the app is what kills it. Zoom, however, works on just about all devices.

Just had some coworkers complaining the other day in slack about use of RingCentral since its rebranded zoom but software won't run well on their linux dev machines! Zoom itself they have no issues with, unless other people join using the RingCentral client apparently.

tl;dr - yes, a compelling video chat software must run well on all employee devices for real success

It doesn't have to be, though. Just like iMessage is hugely successful despite being limited to Apple devices, and even then widely differing in features and reliability, for example, between iOS and macOS.

A wonderful collaborative experience could just be a USP for the platform. FWIW, the now obsoleted iChat was way ahead of the curve compared to the current iteration of FaceTime in group settings, anyway.

FaceTime doesn't necessarily have to support only Apple devices:

Petition: Keep your promise to make FaceTime open source https://www.change.org/p/apple-inc-keep-your-promise-to-make...

Legal battle may be to blame for Apple breaking Steve Jobs’ FaceTime promise https://macdailynews.com/2018/06/07/legal-battle-may-be-to-b...

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