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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we'll only get two new chat apps this year.

Can't wait to tell all my friends on Allo, Chat, Duo, Hangouts, Spaces, Messenger, Voice and Wave. Pretty sure I'm missing a few.

Newest nonsense from google, two Google Meet apps

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/05/googles-merging-of-video-c...

This drives me bonkers. 10 years ago, I could easily place a call to my mom from Gmail. This was easy, and importantly, easy for her to figure out.

This endless parade of chat and video things that don't work very well is just nonsense.

'Meet' required an email invitation. So we went from clicking a button in Gmail itself to having to sit there and send an email.

This Duo thing doesn't autocomplete email addresses that are in your contacts.

And it ALL WORKED FINE 10 years ago! It's not like they're moving in fits and starts towards something that works. They had something that worked, and just utterly wrecked it.

We originally had Google Chat which was similar - super simple - super easy to use for existing gmail users. Reliable. Lots of people had it.

I swear they rebranded it like 5 times and each time had new interfaces, apps, features, dropped features, etc etc. And where did we end up now?

Google Chat :-D

Yeah - I could send both 'chat' messages as well as SMS' right from inside Gmail. Now there's some Messages web app that is kind of lame.

If it makes you feel any better (it probably won't), it drives the internal people bonkers too. Five years ago Google's shitty product strategy was a fun weird thing that we could laugh at. Now we can only cry.

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