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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

Hangouts == WhatsApp. It's the older chat + video system. It's being split into Meet and Chat.

Meet == Zoom. It's video conferences for businesses.

Duo == FaceTime. It's video calling, with integrations into the Phone app on Android.

I guess “meet” being separate makes sense but I have to say that in the Apple ecosystem “Duo” and “Hangouts” have their counterparts in the unified iMessage/FaceTime system.

Hangouts is pretty much a dead product so I see it going away soon anyway.

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...

There is a timeline, at least for entreprise customers.

They haven't stuck to that timeline at all.

> Classic Hangouts will be retired for all G Suite customers starting in October 2019

Chat within Gmail is still hangouts. Hangouts.google.com still works. Users still use the hangouts apps.

On the personal side, if you use Google Fi, SMS integration is still only available via Hangouts. This is a somewhat unique feature of Fi and Google Voice. You can send/receive SMS within Hangouts via browser or app all the same. It's not like the Messages app for web (which relies on your phone being online).

They have a newer timeline at https://support.google.com/a/answer/9197126?hl=en&ref_topic=...

My guess is they have realized what terrible idea it is to get rid of Hangouts while everyone is still using it.

But that Hangout is not this Hangout. This is a Slack competitor. Same name different product.

no, this hangouts is still that hangouts. the slack competitor is "hangouts chat", the regular old hangouts app from 5 years ago is still going strong and most likely what somebody is talking about when they talk about hangouts.

IIRC, hangouts chat is still only available to paid g-suite customers.

The slack-competitor app is only available on G-Suite and recently dropped the "Hangouts" from the name (now just "Chat" instead of "Hangouts Chat").

I would say the same for Duo.

Hangouts isn't pushed, but it's a holdover until they finish the merge of duo/video chat into messages, and the GSuite consolidation of meet/chat. There's some cool things coming from google that should have been done earlier, but represents them finally bringing all the pieces together in meaningful manner.

That's what they said when they introduced Hangouts.

Sounds like business-speak for internal politics to me.

iMessage counterpart is Messages(with RCS)

You used to be able to IM, voice chat, video chat, group versions of the former set, Google voice call Google voice sms, do all of the prior transparently on all of your devices, local sms, and local call from Hangouts.

Then they decided that wasn't the way they wanted things and have been slowly killing it off for 5ish years now

You could add Chat = Slack, for context.

I wish - we're using Google docs so I wouldn't mind cutting slack subscription but it's nowhere close. Even teams are better

Like the message I answered to, I didn't mean that it was equivalent in quality.

And all of them seem to use the same core audio/video tech which has terrible echo cancellation, variable lag, and clicky jittery audio...

I think it's still using some proprietary transport which is UDP over TCP over UDP or something...

It's fun because Duo implies "Deux", or "2". And it takes up to 12 people ;D

At this point it wouldn't surprise me if Duo gets renamed...

It was only two at the beginning. The desktop app still not supports groups

Duodecimal == 12

Nice one!

They already had Hangouts when they started creating Duo, so maybe it means duo-ver (do-over).

Duo was originally announced alongside "Allo". But Allo was killed off last year https://allo.google.com/

Yes, I'm familiar with the history. The tendency to launch things, kill them off, and launch something else was kind of the point of the joke.

Because in the start, google had Allo and Duo. and Allo was for chat and Duo for calling. And then they killed Allo, but not Duo.

That's the best explanation I've ever seen. That's exactly it. Thanks.

But even that isn't the complete picture. It's shouldn't take a shaman, a scholar, and random internet strangers, to explain what the heck they're doing in the audio/video messaging domain.

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