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It's binary: you're there or not. You can't be idle or busy anymore, which sucks pretty hard for regular users.

It's more than that: The Android app has no feedback at all. I have no idea even whether you're there or not. It's a complete clusterfuck, and orders of magnitude inferior to the old Google Talk app, which worked fantastically well.

This was literally fixed in the last day. There's now feedback similar to the browser app.

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13uvbygrw2zyfopw04...

I wonder if the bug is related to these changes.

Yeah, the lack of status is exactly why no one uses SMS for messaging.

If I didn't want to know if the recipient was currently online and could chat idly, I'd use SMS.

(My brain short-circuited there for a moment when trying to form a reply to a comment that was both extremely sarcastic and ludicrously wrong. Hopefully the above meets all our expectations.)

Hangouts is realtime and shows "now typing" indicators, which aren't present in SMS. It's hard to see whether someone left, in which case better asynchronous communication should be used, or whether it's a lull in conversation.

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