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nomoreplease

So this news story is meaningless?

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It's not meaningless. It's an opportunity for HN to complain about the shutdown of Google Reader

good one :)

Ah, see I was going to take the opportunity to complain about shutting down the gateway from Hangouts to Google Voice!

I'm a Fi customer with an iPhone, and when April of this year rolled around, I was living juuuust outside of cell service, thus relying heavily on Hangouts to forward SMS and provide voice calls.

Google was supposed to replace this with something called, I believe, Messages by Google. But somehow they didn't manage to release this for iPhone... like ever as far as I can tell? Or at least not so far.

So I was stranded without the ability to make voice calls for two months. Paying customer mind you.

To be fair, Fi was an amazing deal when I was doing a lot of international travel, and I've stuck with it because the pay-as-you go aspect is still pretty nice (and because international travel will presumably return someday).

But part of me wishes that after Reader was canceled I had just pronounced anathema on the whole company.

I’m pretty sure this is another Google branding thing. I’ve been using it for free as “Hangouts Meet” for years. Now it’s just “Meet” and there’s no personal version anymore.

I am losing track of things. In a personal Gmail account, I now have two options for video calls, Hangouts and Meet, listed separately in the l/h nav bar.

This is also the case for a corporate Gmail account.

Product has never been Google's strong suit, but I'm in awe of how incredibly poor their messaging/communication product strategy has been over the last decade. They had a decade long headstart and they more than squandered it through the selective application of neglect where attention was needed and attention where things were already great.

It's one of the most confusing things I've ever seen in a Google product.

At some point I accepted a clickthrough and Hangouts disappeared from my Gmail. I've been using it for years to stay in touch with my parents, now they still see Hangouts and can call me on it, but I have no way to initiate a call with them except by sending them a text chat with a link to a meet?! That's useless, it doesn't make a ringing sound on their end. Personal video calls are not corporate meetings!

I sort of defaulted to using Hangouts for a long time because I used to work on Gmail. The current state of things is embarrassing for Google - I have literally no idea how to do video calls with my parents using Google products now (as they can last longer than an hour and we don't set a fixed time for them, just a date). There's this thing called Duo but it's mobile only, or at least tied to mobiles, but my parents use their computer to do video calls so I don't know what to tell them to do.

I'll probably just look for some alternative. Maybe Skype still exists and works well? Does anyone have any recommendations?

Not really. I wasn't aware they had read the point where it was going to be limited again, but it was always the plan to limit it again at some point.

Of course with Teams and now Facetime essentially free (as long as at least on in the group has an iPad, iPhone or Mac) I doubt it will make that much of a difference.

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