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Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

The thing about iMessage is that you don’t need a separate app. You can have iMessage and SMS right next to each other.

Google never seemed to understand this convenience. They released Allo without any SMS support and were hostile so suggestions that it was a gating feature to adoption. Allo predictably failed as it offered no benefits over competing services, and no SMS fallback so that it could be the single messaging app.

If Google wants to level the playing field they should do it by competing and innovating. I suggest they start that endeavor by better understanding why people actually use iMessage in the first place.

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The really sad thing is that they actually had this.

Hangouts on a Google Fi phone used to let you consolidate everything to hangouts - SMS, Chats, Calls, etc. It was a pain it was limited to Fi, but it worked just fine. You could also pop open Hangouts in Gmail in your browser and there all your sms messages were, nicely grouped and tracked.

Then apparently hangouts stopped being cool enough - so Google decided to shutter it in favor of "Google Messages". Technically - "Messages for web" also supports the same feature set as the integrated hangouts, but it FUCKING SUCKS.

The phone/browser syncing is bad, the UI is a complete regression. Just the process of enabling it required me to actually contact support at google fi (you have to open settings, disable previous sms settings for fi, stop hangouts, update your google account, and then opt into a beta).

Basically - Hangouts did exactly this, but Google continues to act like Google, and shutter any product that might actually be a good foundation to build/maintain, since Google has shown AGAIN AND AGAIN that it can't actually maintain any product.

Google can innovate just fine - it's the follow through that they lack.

I also had the Hangouts/sms combined app on my Google Nexus. But as you said, after annoying everyone because the sms app was suddenly gone, they annoyed everyone again because it was suddenly back. And then the annoyed everyone with several new messengers, though I am not sure who still payed attention at that time. Leaving out how annoying the death of google talk before all that was.

Google has messengers on every android phone preinstalled and nobody uses them, because they create them, never significantly update them and then abandon them. It's completely their fault they don't even get a mention when people talk about messaging apps.

Yes I used Hangouts and Google Fi for this exact reason. It was perfect. If they would have just rolled this out globally to all Android users I believe Google would have won the messaging battle with Apple.

I've since switched from Android to iOS, but Fi+Hangouts was amazing at the time. Too bad Google seemingly abandoned both projects.

This is what annoyed me the most. Google was there, they had an awesome solution. Then they just abandoned it. Even in its old, clunky state, it was still immensely useful, and user feedback was -very- vocal about its utility. They just don't care.

Strong agree, and here's my anecdote:

Around the time that they started f-ing around with 15 different chat apps and killing off products, and integrations with other products, was when a Google account with "integration" started to become more of a hassle than worthwhile to me, personally. I used to use gChat, Hangouts, etc. but now I just use iPhone stuff since everyone I know has iPhone stuff. Apple hasn't deprecated anything since at least 5 years ago (the last time I had a work iPhone) so to me that signals that I can keep iPhones and not have to continually figure out what the "new way to chat" is, like I had to with Google. I've almost completely migrated from Google, except for Photos (which is superior to alternatives, IMO; I can actually backup my Google Photos from my Linux CLI whereas I couldn't figure out how to reliably do that with Apple Photos) and Google Search usage. I have had my Gmail account since ~2004 and I basically killed/deleted all of the services in my Google account now (even Google Voice sucks now, so I basically abandoned my phone number I used from ~2001 that I ported into it) except for forwarding email to my new email address and using Photos. I used to be "all in" with Google, but they made it too hard to keep using stuff that kept being killed off, so they dug their own grave.

Yup, and didn't this exist pre Google Fi? Maybe it was just certain android phones, but I remember messaging one or two friends from hangouts in Gmail while at work, and they would respond really quick because they got the messages on their android phones. This may have been back before iPhones had SMS handoff built into iMessage on Macs, so in a way Google was more advanced than Apple's solution then.

Of course Google has killed all that many times over. They made their own bed.

I don't think they even need to innovate much.

I never understood why Google didn't just clone Apple's app many years ago. Hangouts was pretty close - take that, add e2e encryption for in-app threads (like iMessage) and make sure SMS is there as a peer. Make a client for the major platforms and then let the project slip into maintenance mode.

Instead, they championed RCS which (last time I checked) isn't encrypted which is borderline unethical IMHO.

According to Google they have crypto in RCS: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/15/22534173/google-android-s...

I had to click through and read because I thought you were saying Google added crypto mining to their chat client.

I remember being baffled by the introduction of duo and allo when they already had both messaging and video solutions in other apps.

Network effects are big and they were intentionally reducing theirs! Shockingly it hasn't gone well since then.

I don't have duo or allo or anything like that on my Android phone, but I have one friend that I get different background color - a darker blue than normal sms, read receipts, and encryption, in the Google Android "Messages" app.

We've never really dug in to why, as we're both using the default app. No other conversation has ever had this blue message and lock symbol and checkmarks going on.

Yep, I have one of those as well. Just one...

RCS doesn’t need a separate app either. You can have SMS and RCS conversations in the same app regardless of if you’re using Google Messages/Samsung Messages/etc

> The thing about iMessage is that you don’t need a separate app.

Given iMessage basically has no base outside of the US because everyone uses Whatsapp or Line I'm not convinced this is terribly neccessary.

This comment is in response to Google complaining specifically amount iMessage usage in the US.

Yes, but it does suggest that converting any given market doesn't require there to be a singular combined app. I think it might not have been a terrible idea, but probably not a terrible idea.

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