Google’s Messaging Mess: A Timeline
theverge.com
theverge.com
I really thought Google was going to be the answer for a completely integrated, non-Apple online life.
Anyways, long story short, after endless frustration trying to get everything to work seamlessly, I ditched Google entirely.
My email is now IMAP. I have multiple accounts in one app. My calendar and contacts are now WebDAV. Every other app I use on PC and mobile can integrate with them. My messaging is now Element/Matrix with bridges to whatever other services I need. My search is DuckDuckGo, browser is Firefox, etc.
Currently, everything is as integrated, or more integrated, than it was with Google, and worlds more stable. Somehow, despite being huge and having all the data and basically a monopoly, they still can't integrate to save their lives.
The thing that annoys me most is that (as far as I can tell) only the big name providers have integrated mail/caldav/carddav, if you use a bring-your-own-domain solution they need to be added as 3 separate accounts (at least on iOS/macOS).
I've been looking for a sane calendar service that's not Google calendar and there's just nothing that's open-standards compatible.
There's a couple of other good CalDAV servers out there too, though of course as Fastmail CEO I can't really advertise anybody else :p
Will check it out right away :)
It has IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV. It has a snappy and responsive web interface and their iOS app is equally as good.
They have configuration of profiles for MacOS and iOS down (I can't talk to other environments).
I have a bunch of domains doing email through there, but I run my own DNS. I had a need to configure things that Fastmail's DNS doesn't deal with (IPv6 etc) but for general use, it's great. Properly configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC, good spam filtering, easy contact managenment etc.
Then they did nothing with it for maybe seven years? MMS would silently fail so people inviting you to events via group chat or sending you a photo would just think you were ignoring them.
Hangouts came and the mess with that and sms was worse. I had nexus phones back then which also had turn by turn navigation before the iPhone did.
Huge missed opportunity, years wasted. When the iPhone 5 came out and Apple Maps shipped turn by turn nav and eventually iMessage did everything voice did but better I switched and never went back.
Google’s software consumer stack sucks. I also tried to like it - it’s a mostly crappy mix of stuff that gets dropped, ignored, and poorly integrated.
At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.
As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excellent devices yet severely limited because of iOS. If iOS hadn't done calling/messaging/FaceTime right, I would have completely ditched them.
It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).
I think it's just that growing tablets to be competitive with desktops is either really, really hard or just not reasonable to expect. As a form factor, for all that I love it and you'd have to tear my iPad out of my cold dead hands, it just has inherent limitations to go with it's strengths.
Not them, but my argument would be compared against a full desktop OS.
I love the form factor and for smaller things, if I had a full blown OS, I would be able to do so much more and not carry both my laptop and my iPad.
I think that imposes significant limitations. Some of the more powerful apps I use on my iPad have quite fiddly interfaces that would be fine on a desktop, but are really awkward on the tablet. It is getting better, but very slowly as developers figure out how to adapt to the form factor.
The new Multitasking interface does look like a big improvement though. Hopefully that will help developers to step up a bit.
It never really mattered if PlayForSure, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone etc were big successes or not, the company was absolutely fine anyway. XBOX is a success, but the massive billon+ write off they suffered back in the day means even now overall it's probably not made a profit, and if so not much. IE has floundered for over a decade. They do have many successful products but most of them could die and it wouldn't matter.
It's the same with Google. As long as they're awash in a torrent of search advertising money nothing else matters. Like Micorosoft they do have some successful non-core products. Chrome, Android, GMail, Google Docs, Chromebooks. However all of those could drop stone dead and they'd be A-Okay.
This is why Amazon is so impressive to me. Bezos built two world class mega-businsses simultaneously from scratch. I can't think of a single other example of this anywhere.
They're also very much artificial constructs, in the sense at this point they are as much political as economic artefacts. The Chaebol are more recent in their modern form but followed the same model.
Office, windows, Azure/development, Xbox/gaming are all integrated and cash cows.
Research, sure it isn't a direct revenue generating group but their patents portfolio is immense.
Heck, even LinkedIn is $10B/year business now. Maybe you're living under a rock?
Windows and Azure are the tent poles I was thinking of when I said they had more than one now.
I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, in the same way that I think it's unreasonable to consider Apple's applications business separately from MacOS. Split Office from Windows and I think it would struggle, certainly it wouldn't have got to where it is now. It's an add-on to the Windows business. On it's own it wouldn't be industry dominating the way Windows, AWS, Google Search, etc are. It's a good business but not industry shaping, not anymore anyway.
Now they’ve pivoted to grow azure and O365 successfully in addition to leverage the Xbox via game pass to fit into that strategic world.
I think this mostly supports your point - it took an existential crisis and ousting a CEO that couldn’t adapt in order to save them when their cash cow started to falter.
Nadella could quickly release office cross-platform because of work during Ballmer.
There is a common HN trope that Ballmer was doing everything perfectly and Nadella just continued it.
I don’t buy it and neither did the market. (Neither did Microsoft’s board presumably)
I think Ballmer’s entire strategic direction was long-term wrong and Nadella changed it. This isn’t to say no projects started under Ballmer (they definitely did) it’s about whether those were prioritized or would have ever shipped under him successfully.
If the wrong things are considered important - it doesn’t really matter what projects are happening.
They're still trying very hard to put everything on web so Chrome can be what windows used to be.
This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases).
I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc.
All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind.
Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages.
That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.
I do however agree about the positive cross-platform support. From my experience, which is very limited - it is the decades of backward compat and complexity that makes native development so tiresome. It gets even worse when there are multiple platforms with not much in common.
Thanks, I'll check out Urbit.
And? How many non-Chrome browsers do we have? Even Microsoft gave in to Chromium. Can't wait for Google's next move to tie their protocols deeper into the browser just like they did with Android and playstore services.
This was another eye opener to me, how limited high quality developers are.
I suppose you didn't check the stock...
What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows.
The ring of death ( = console) isn't even related to the cash cow in consoles. It's the 30% commission on 60€ games.
Anti-competitive behavior for not releasing it to other platforms in the past, doesn't mean it's "just an add-on".
Office for Windows was released in the same year as Windows 3.0, supporting all the new core technologies including OLE. Before then MS desktop software products were also-rans. From this point on they dominated, because they had been engineered natively for Windows right alongside the development of Windows itself before any of their competitors even had access to the frameworks and dev tools, or Windows 3.0 to develop and test on. It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform.
XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
Just like iOS and Apple apps or Chrome and Google sites?
> XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
xbox was $3.5B (8.5%) of the $41B revenue last quarter - not sure why you think that wouldn't affect bottom line or understand the fact that gaming/xbox is a growth business with a recognizable brand.
To give you a perspective, xbox alone made more than all apple services except for App store (even then the difference isn't that huge).
Microsoft has a long history of failures from Bob to the Zune, but their core stuff, including Windows, Office, Visual Studio, is solid. Bob didn’t destroy Windows. Occasionally the products go off course, like Windows ME, but they seem to correct fairly quickly.
It certainly has been disappointing watching rock solid software from Google just disintegrate over the past decade. If it wasn’t for the iOS Mail app, I suspect gmail would be completely botched by now.
Another consideration to the Verge article, how much money has Google spent doing all of this wild stuff just to their messaging products? I would guess well over $10b. Organizationally Google’s management layers should be gutted. From the CEO to middle management, the company is run by people who couldn’t operate an average company lacking a high margin cashflow cow.
I buy all their hardware in spite of not being able to use FaceTime or iMessage (beyond than SMS functionality) or any of their iCloud and services sharing because my wife and friends are all on Android/Linux/Windows. It's not a big deal because most software I use is on the web anyway.
But Google is a mystery to me. I recently tried to subscribe to Youtube Premium, but they wouldn't let me sign up with my Google account because it's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account. So if you pay for one of their services you're locked out of others. I don't think this is a business strategy. Google is simply flotilla of rudderless ships.
Every year I keep thinking Sundar Puchai’s ouster is imminent but it has yet to happen. Which perhaps explains Google’s disfunctionality even more.
Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment.
Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.
> WebDAV
Can you explain how you implemented these too?
In a way its a blessing for other smaller companies to perform better. Dinosaurs may have all the money in the world but it does not make them better in execution.
This isn't true, if you were a Fi subscriber. Fi subscribers were able to keep using Hangouts SMS up until they launched the replacement, Fi support in Messages for Web. There was no time where Web SMS was unsupported.
The transition worked reasonably well for me. I do miss the Gmail integration, and it's lame that you can't have RCS enabled if you want Web support (of course Hangouts never supported RCS anyway so it's not a regression, and hopefully it will be fixed someday). But otherwise it's a fine replacement and I use it every day.
I agree, as I mentioned, that the loss of Gmail integration is annoying. But the ability to use SMS on the web, without requiring a connection to your phone at all, is still there. There was no time period where Web SMS wasn't available for Fi subscribers.
I remember buying the first DVD Recorder on the market and being pissed later on that I couldn't burn the (much better) DVD+R type discs in my drive.
I never switched from my carrier to Project Fi. Never switched to Hangouts. Never switched to Inbox. Never switched to Allo and Duo.
So as far as I'm concerned... Gmail and Google Voice have pretty much always been working as intended for me.
It's kind of what you have to expect when you consider that we are Google's beta testers. Gmail was in beta for YEARS. If something new shows up, I may wait a year and see if it's still around, then maybe consider that I start using it... if I have a use for it.
In the end, Gmail is worth it to me over having to run my own email server. Never again. Ugh.
Can't wait for Project Back to the Basics. If it ever happens.
This is sad for me because I hate how locked down Apple ecosystem is, I constantly get rubbed by their store policy that I stick with Android, but life is much simpler in the Apple ecosystem and none of their competitors look like they have what it takes to compete (eg. Samsung software is a joke even when the hardware is competitive).
Just imagine if there is a consistent, coherent multi-year strategy, it would be way harder to get a promotion.
(I actually worked on one of the mentioned messaging products, it was a shitshow)
Is it like having an insane amount of validation, or everchanging requirements, or huge technical constraints, demotivated or unqualified people, etc.. what is it ?
i still remember the time when google was at the forefront of web app innovation, and it was probably already quite big. So i'm really curious to know what are the things that make it different today.
This was last-ditch effort to outwhatsapp WhatsApp. Essentially this is high-risk high-reward project. Google comp is not setup to deal with this. Some people who were early in the game and shipped initial version got their good reviews/promos and quickly left after ship. Rest of the team started a shaky ride trying to find that extra secret feature that will turn this ship around, while metrics were not so good. This lead to worse reviews, management reshuffles, unsteady short-term micromanagement. Which in turn motivated more people to change projects.
The failure of enthusiastic VP of Communications and Photos (I kid you fucking not, he traded Hangouts for Photos, he wanted to shutdown Hangouts, but it turned out a lot of enterprise customers depend on it. So GSuite/GCP said they are going to take over Hangouts, so after some politicking he traded it for Photos). Anyway, he’s failure is to setup and manage this project in such a way when smallest negative result doesn’t lead to a shitshow.
I’ve been using Gmail and Hangouts since they were introduced, migrated from Google Talk to Hangouts which was fairly transparent except I had to stop using Pidgin and use the web app instead. Still using Hangouts all these years later until they make me switch to Chat. It works fine.
There is a chance I try to get my family and friends to switch to Element or something instead of Chat, but it’s unlikely, since Google will provide a smooth switchover and we’ll all just have to tap a button to switch, and they’ll interoperate.
I got a Google Voice number many years ago too, but only use it for forwarding, never set up Fi, and it still works fine. Never enabled the hangouts SMS integration, because I can already get texts on the computer.
I skipped out on Allo and Duo; they seemed like a lost cause from the start. Never really posted much on Google+ anyway.
My music was in Google Play and now it’s in YouTube Music, but I mostly stream anyway. I don’t love the new interface, but it mostly works fine.
I had lots of RSS feeds in Google Reader, but NewsBlur had a simple import and works just as well as Reader ever did.
"Google Chat" feels a lot like they finally fixed all the bugs they introduced when they replaced GChat with Hangouts.
* How / whether you're allowed to integrate SMS / phone messages with web based chat (what we used to call instant messaging). E.g. can you get your text messages and voicemails on the computer? At some points you could, at some points you couldn't. At one point there was Google Voice, at another point Hangouts could do it, now you have to use the "Messages" app for texts, which is still relatively broken compared to either of the previous methods and doesn't support any kind of instant messaging.
* The different rules that apply if you're using Google Fi. For example, the Messages help page [1] says you can turn on "chat features", which lets you send messages over data and get other conveniences like read receipts and large photos (because they're not sent over MMS). But wait, if you use Google Fi, if you want to get messages and make calls on your computer (i.e. with your phone off), you have to disable chat features. You can't have both. [2] It's absolutely insane. This worked 100% correctly with Hangouts - perfect integration.
[1] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/7189714?hl=en
I'm really just waiting to have a free weekend to de-Google most of my connections to Google.
All those were launched more than a decade ago, though.
It's true they don't overhaul the whole product every year, or make major UI adjustments, but a fair bit has changed in those products.
> Gmail had the entire backend rewritten
> Docs was completely rewritten
> Spreadsheets was rewritten twice
I think I’m starting to understand why these products very rarely receive new features, which I believe is the point di4na was making.
Disclaimer: Work for Google, but not on these products or anything user facing.
The multiple inbox thingy for gmail may be great, but i still have a gmail that is sluggish af
Same for gdoc. Parity with excel ? It is so sluggish and a pain to do anything with it that i now pay for excel...
Sure, but there’s unobtrusive, and then there’s completely imperceptible. Where are these new features? I can’t think of anything that’s been added to Google Docs in years.
I often get stuck trying to do something and search for “How to do X in Google Docs”, only to discover that they haven’t gotten around to implementing something super basic.
Like placeholders in template documents. You can create a template document in Google Docs, but as far as I can tell, it’s just a normal document with a different way to make a copy of it. You can’t set up placeholders! Surely that’s the whole point of template documents‽ It feels like an intern had a passing interest in implementing templates then left before they finished. And then nobody was interested in working on it for years afterwards.
Out of interest, I searched for a changelog and found this:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272
Does this seem like anything other than a mothballed project to you? This is meant to be a flagship product from a giant company, and they were barely scraping together one tiny feature per month until September 2020, then lost interest and managed just one single new feature in the nine months since then. And you still can’t do super basic things with it.
But hey, at least they found the time to completely rewrite the UI layer, right? You don’t see how this appears to be a team who feels zero market pressure treating it like a retirement hobby rather than a job, right?
Docs is at the heart of the business suite and it lacks so many basic things, it drags down the entire suite offer.
But if I were an enterprise, I'd be super cautious to sign any contract with Google for any product. Who knows they'll cancel the product your business is built on, with 30 days warning.
Can you imagine IBM / RedHat / Microsoft doing that? No. Can you imagine Google doing it?
Of course that's the free version, but still.
After following this nonsense product timeline for 16 years from the original Google Talk days, my last chat thread still using Hangouts moved to Facebook Messenger. chat.google.com is just aggressively worse in far too many ways, and will surely be killed circa 2024.
> chat.google.com is just aggressively worse in far too many ways, and will surely be killed circa 2024.
I doubt it. Google Chat is Google's enterprise product offering like Microsoft's skype.
Yeah, at our company we have actually used Google Chat somewhat succesfully as main tool for internal communication
They could improve Chat a lot if they just cared to do native clients. Seriously, how many developers would that require? Like three for macOS, and the same for Windows and Linux?
I much preferred it to gmail, and I was not happy when they discontinued it
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/12446824/heads-up-...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/03/google-photos-adds-a-chat-...
“plus innumerable chat features built into other Google products we won’t mention here”
We really need to disconnect the need for phones for services that can be digital. People don't have landlines and there's a lot of people that would probably prefer a data-only plan since they don't make phone calls. Regular phone calls aren't normally encrypted either.
At least with Google Voice I've been able to circumvent having a 'real' US number -- giving the data brokers more data points. That is until I get locked out of services like PayPal who blocked Google Voice so I have no way to authenticate (not that they have a reason to need my phone number to bridge my already-verified bank with another service).
Not sure if this was realistic or the new products were trying to create whole new tech that stopped this but when they saw different directions some core standards for interoperability would have helped. So if you had Hangouts and I had Allo we could still chat as least in the most standard was of voice/video/message. Proliferation would have mattered less and the product teams could have focused on UX/ new features/brand separately to their hearts content.
It would also help people try platforms cause I I could swap to the latest and greatest but still chat to my contacts Id be more willing to try vs trying to drag people across to a new platform.
Never bring a hardware solution to a software problem.
Communications should happen on the internet. Not on switched lines. Hard disagree with the proposal here that phone lines solve interoperability. Have you tried starting a phone company? How fun was that?
Although Talk was one of their longest-running messaging tools, they ultimately pulled back their openness approach, blaming... pretty much everyone else (for not following suit): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-talk-to-...
Edited to add: I should note that their public reasoning for ending an era of open communication standards support differs from some internal accounts I have heard. Google Hangouts was launched amid a lot of internal turmoil related to Google+ and their desire to reclaim social.
That’s not how it works, promotion does not move you to a different position. Project leads in charge stay in charge after promotion. What often happens though is that promoted people leverage their new, higher level to move to or start more desirable projects.
It's just not meaningful for Google. It's like Jeff Bezos is so rich that he picked a very awkward candidate to replace his wife, but having a female companion to Jeff is no longer crucial for his success (imagine what would happen if Jeff married his current girl friend...).
It doesn't automatically put it front and centre at I/O, but as it's certain Google will want something to highlight which makes working on a new product is a fairly sensible idea if that's your goal. Innovating or maintaining an existing one is a lot less marketable.
You work for Google; there may be some bias here.
>E.g. Stadia, which a lot of people doubted would be technically possible at all.
Technically impossible? Really? I don't think anyone held doubt. Perhaps people figured it'd be expensive to develop but certainly not impossible.
Yes, so many people were citing latency would make it unplayable, etc.
> You work for Google; there may be some bias here.
If I was stating an opinion, maybe. In this case, I am merely pointing out the counter example: Stadia, etc.
I don't think Google has solved the fundamental issue which is latency and home broadband infrastructure. They can handwave it with AI, ML latency algorithms and video compression algorithms, but the latency is still not competitive to conventional gaming.
Wii U, Steam Link/Remote, nVidia Play/Geforce Now etc
I can't say I've ever heard it talked about in my gaming circles.
Confused the heck out of me because I have a personal account with Google One for extra storage space, and a Google Workspace account for a managed domain for my startup.
Just an example of the mess: https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v
They had multiple opportunities to dominate the markets which Zoom, Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger own today. Simply iterating within a single brand rather than this ADHD approach would have got them there.
They own controlling percentages of the email market and mobile market, it was all an enormous open goal.
His peers -- Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg -- all deeply understand and concern themselves with their companies' respective places in the world. They think twenty years into the future and frequently take risks to mitigate a changing landscape and position themselves for future wins.
Sundar Pichai isn't one to make bold bets. His company is a fat pig suckling on ad money. Google itself is completely drunk, comatose.
Google needs bold leadership. If nothing changes, it will eventually fall into decline and become a footnote.
Not only can this happen, it's already happened many times before.
[2] https://stratechery.com/2019/the-iphone-and-apples-services-...
Seen through this lens, their enterprise offerings and free messaging services are almost an afterthought.
I remember when they launched an email app Inbox i loved using it but 3 years later they decided to kill it and guess what they decided to integrate inbox app features into gmail app and then I was forced to use it.
On contrary if we compare apple to Google. Apple does one thing really better they integrate their services really well across all devices and that’s one of the reason its hard to leave Apple Ecosystem.
This is like the exact opposite of what we want. It was the best when my gmail tab was email, SMS, chat, video calling all in one.
It's not so bad trying something new every once in a while, but a strategy of assuming everyone will immediately jump ship from an old product that worked just fine to a new product that does less and sucks more is self-assured destruction. You can apply this to a lot of Google products, such as Google Play Music > YouTube Music, not just their messaging blunders.
I still use SMS in the UK if I'm in an area with poor data connection. SMS will work over 2G even.
I wish that would stop. SMS is horribly insecure as a 2nd factor.
Mobile phone plans can be highjacked just far too easily, and is a highly vulnerable vector for getting "keys to the kingdom" (ie your private Gmail account) for complete identity and asset theft.
I do. I don't own a smartphone though.
And of course, they are trying to kill it. (at least that is what the message I got last night said) ... sigh.
I really feel like the article is massively missing out for not mentioning that Talk/Hangouts had interoperability, that you could Bring Your Own Software.
Google does plenty wrong, but I have to say it's noticeable that when tech companies actually do something right they often get zero to negative credit for it, so from that perspective it is hard to blame them sometimes.
No, just no.
I don't want to open my email to then hit a chat tab to message my brother. They must be separate apps; it's messy when they try to cram everything into one app, there's even Meet there now.
(So there's a separate Google Chat app as well, but that's not mentioned at all in the Hangouts messaging, so I can only assume it's another dead project#. Functionality was awful and clunky when I tried it at some stage before).
Whoever's come up with this has absolutely no idea how their products are being used in the real world.
Looking for an alternative now that's not eg Facebook. Not sure about Discord, due to security. Not too keen on Signal due to ease of use, but might end up on that.
----
Edit: Signal is looking much nicer on the mobile than I recalled, sharing multiple pictures is really easy! This might be the go to.
#Also checked again on "Google Chat", still buggy (tried sharing multiple pics, weird behaviour) - but at least it's got a dark background now, so appears to be in dev - even though they'd like us to Chat in Gmail..
It even has video calls and recently added screensharing to them.
I feel like naming things is something Apple works really hard on. And why they place so much emphasis on it in their keynotes, when they use the phrase "And we're calling it ..."
iPhone Xs Max
Apple has improved their naming but they had a bunch of duds.
I still see "Rooms" in my Gmail window.
Does it mean they are now plugged in SS7 network? Thats a throve of new user data.
- Out of use: AIM
- Out of use: IRQ
- Out of use: IRC
- Insert your old messanger: here
- Privacy nerds: Signal
- Feature fans: Telegram
- Lonely people: Tinder
- Parents-Generation: WhatsApp / FaceBook / deprecated
- Brick phones (the real privacy nerds): SMS or E-Mail
- Ahead of time people: delta.chat
- Grandparents: E-Mail
Let's have a different take on this: This company likes to experiment and innovate. :) Glad that this is still possible.
Having said that: Probably naming the messengers in a different manner could receive an overhaul to confuse less people. And: Wouldn't route my chat traffic neither over Apple, Google or any other FAANG+.