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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

According to /r/android this also finally brings Google Voice into Hangouts: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2fz6hh/hangouts_and...

I haven't seen the update yet to try it, but am hoping I do soon. This is long, long overdue.

All this said - Hangouts on desktop is still so much worse than GChat was - and GChat had free calls too. I'd type a number, two seconds later it would be ringing in the bottom right corner. Now, a Hangout window opens, the Hangouts plugin loads, my CPU goes haywire...

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I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

I believe you can opt out of it. I was annoyed for a while at having Hangouts foisted on me but now (in Gmail at least) I've gone back to the old interface which, while not jazzy, is perfectly functional.

Same here. I tried very hard to transition to Hangouts to get a jump on what will probably be unavoidable at some point anyway, but I had to revert back to the old interface after a few weeks because GV/VoIP is so unusable on Hangouts.

The Hangouts app must be built by Google's worst engineering team. It's terrible on mobile, too. The Play Store and maybe Youtube are probably slower than it, but at least those have an excuse: heavy content/graphics. What's Hangouts' excuse? A few lines of text on the screen and some tiny icons? It's a chat app...it's supposed to be fast, not super slow.

I've been using it for months, took some getting used to but it works great.

On mobile I dislike all of the kinematics. If you're composing a message and scroll up to quickly reread something, the keyboard will fly off the screen; getting it back requires tapping on a text box ...but now the keyboard is _covering_ part of the message you need to read; got to scroll back up---damn lost that keyboard again.

There's also no way to 1) hide people's avatars: I really don't need 20 visual reminders (one for each message they've sent) of who I'm chatting to; I don't even need 1! 2) hide the emoticon selector: who uses this rubbish? 3) adjust the "people you hangout with": there are 6 tiles of faces (most of them rigmarole-distributing frequent emailers who suck) and the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with"---the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with".

Google...

If it's any consolation, the new version of it released yesterday seems to have been optimized a lot more than the previous versions. Despite the added functionality, it feels a lot snappier. This is on a Nexus 5, not sure about other/older hardware.

I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going.

In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin.

My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not been a one-time experience, and it has been like this for years at this point.

Perhaps this is why:

http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offe...

Instead of hardware accelerated h264 (almost all chipsets have hardware decoding/encoding of h264), they use their own VP8/9 - which is decoding/encoding on CPU

Also the reason why Google Glass can't do Hangouts - not powerful enough for software encoding.

They should just use h264.

patents

is it that costly really? rest of the world is using h264 pretty much everywhere

Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his grandmother in Norway.

So I tried Google Hangouts. It's marginally better. But it's still awful, and odds are about 50% that one or the other end of just fails to work (suddenly wants to reinstall the plugin, or just plain refuses to recognize the camera).

It's just incredible to me that a decade after I had reliable, working video chat, things appears to have gotten steadily worse, not better... I have 10 times the bandwidth - or more -, for example, both up and down.

Might also be ISPs introducing traffic management and whatnot.

It should be possible to test and analyze this.

Give a try to Netalyzer: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Here is an report sample: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session

I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.

In the end, FaceTime is only adequate software. There isn't anything particularly annoying about it, and it does what the average user expects.

What makes FaceTime incredible is that no one else on the planet can make anything even close to adequate in that space.

It can be mind boggling to cycle through Skype, Lync, Google Hangouts, and every other piece of chat software on your computer, all failing in bizarre ways, only to think, "Oh yeah. Let's try FaceTime" and have it work.

If I ever move overseas again, I will be purchasing an iPod Touch for each and every older family member before departing. FaceTime works remarkably well.

I'll leave aside the meta commentary on your (unneccessary) downvote comment.

Facetime is what makes it possible for me to stay in touch with my family on the other side of the planet, and that's even if I'm sitting out in a park far from Wifi. It just works, and even if it hiccups once in a while, the reliability is high enough that you just shrug it off with the confidence that it will recover. This is on LTE with good reception.

On a recent trip to the US from the UK my wife and I each used a BlackBerry Playbook with the built-in video chat. It was perfect -- no discernible lag and I was able to talk with the kids with great video and sound quality.

So, perhaps Skype and GV are suffering from over-extended networks? It must be hard to justify investing in better network infrastructure for a free product (or when your revenues are minimal). On that note, I don't get the impression that BlackBerry's network has much of a problem with network load these days...

This is what's so annoying about Apple: why no Android client? How can you hope to have a communications platform that is so severely constrained? That's why so few here barely even know about Facetime. You can't invest in it because it's so limited.

'hope to'? They don't hope to, it exists. 15-20 million FaceTime calls every day: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessag...

So 8% of users try it once per day? I'm wondering how that compares to phone, messages, email, whatsapp, Skype, etc? Very poorly, I'd say.

Try appear.in or one of the many other webrtc providers.

skype on android is really, really bad. it doesn't even bother to tell you if your wifi is turned off. it'll just "ring ring ring ring" then show a message that the person wasn't available.

I use their subscriptions plan to call home from my Nexus 4. Most of the time skype on android shows offline users as online. Sometimes it shows me that I am signed in and online, but nobody could see me till I try to signout and signin multiple times. The worst problem is it reboots the phone frequently whenever i do video calls. Gets updates often, but they never fixed any of these problems.

Worse than that; I've found Skype on Android will actually kill the wifi connection. It's awful.

I work for a startup in the commercial video space, and one of the reasons we can compete against such giants is that their software really doesn't work that well... even for people who've paid shedloads for Lync.

I also work in the commercial telecommuting space. Its easy to compete there, because existing solutions are so crusty its laughable. All the voice apps revolve around phone calls and conference calls, things rooted in 1800's ideas about communications.

And it is it holistically proprietary inoperable bullshit now. Your messages still get broadcast through their XMPP infrastructure (for now) so I can still use Telepathy with their services, but the UX is shit because Jingle broke amongst other things.

I end up missing incoming calls because of this - it takes 3-5 seconds for the call to be answered from when I click the accept button. It was much better before.

Same here. Someone calls, I press Accept, and it could take up to 10 seconds to actually accept the call. It would open a new window, start loading stuff, and then the call was missed by the time it was ready. How could anything like that get past the QA team?

Somewhat hilariously this change stops any of the text messages from reaching the google voice web app in favor of hangouts (the web app being basically it's only redeeming quality at this point) and there appears to be some weird behavior when texting people through hangouts.

The webapp was the only reason I still bothered to use GV since it's felt like it's been abandoned for years now. It's frustrating how great this could have been especially with how early it originally came out, but I don't think it's worth it anymore - still no MMS (therefore no groupchat support). No notice of any of those failing either.

People are better off just using iMessage even though it isn't cross platform than dealing with this.

The two benefits I can still think of are that it's easy to switch carriers/numbers since your GV number is an abstraction and if you're out of the country temporarily you can still get texts to your American GV number. Really though FB/Whatsapp and a billion other widely used chat solutions have solved this and people in the US don't switch networks/numbers that often.

Surprisingly enough, GV for iOS was just updated:

- Updated user interface to match iOS7 guidelines - Bug fixes and performance enhancements - Support for Google Voice integration in Hangouts

How about updating on their own platform first to meet their own design guidelines. I'm really disappointed by how Google hooks up to their products and then kills them! This seems like Google Voice still has a pulse, but for how much longer?

A Google product looks ground-breakingly great when it comes out, but then gets more-or-less abandoned with few subsequent releases, and slowly disintegrates?

Yeah, that's what they do.

It actually wasn't a Google product initially. It was GrandCentral. I've been using it since 2006. It's still the best at what it does.

Hangouts on everything is much worse that gchat was, mobile included, sadly

GChat in Gmail still does voice calls as you described them. I use it all the time.

Not if you upgraded to hangouts.

You can still revert back to the old GChat interface and get the old (better) VoIP functionality back.

Hangouts still has it, it's just different. Click the search button, then click the Phone button.

Seriously, my battery life plummets when I'm in a hangout from the heavy CPU usage.

According to that thread this update breaks GV functionality (texting from GV website and texting from Hangouts). Seeing as texting from the webapp is the only reason I even have GV, looks like i'll be ditching that number once they kick everyone off GV for good.

But GChat can not work in Chrome 64 bit... I hate Desktop hangout. Whenever i want to make a call, i have to go to IE11... oohh google....

i embrace this change so now i can make call using my Nexus 7. awesome. it's like having another phone.

This [1] seems to indicate that incoming Google Voice sms messages will appear in hangouts, but I'm not seeing it - can anyone confirm that this is the case? I don't see any settings that would affect this either.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/google-hangouts-gets-deep-g...

The articles mentions "v2.3, rolling out over the next few days" - I'm still on 2.1, so I don't see it either.

Here's the apk for 2.3: http://www.droid-life.com/2014/09/10/google-brings-free-voic...

thanks!

It appears as though just installing the APK doesn't get you all of the Google Voice integration -- you need to wait for some server-side changes to your account as well. (Discovered this after a frustrating hour or so of trying to get GV features to work...)

I'm not running stock, CyanogenMod 10.1.

That said it successfully called my desk phone, and I could successfully call hangouts, but after both the app crashed, and every subsequent launch after that.

Confirmed here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+CheeChew/posts/eaZ9wzPxtmm

Yup. It ses Google might be revisiting their lack of interest in Google Voice, as the iOS app has just seen a significant update as well: https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/google-voice-finally-gets-som...

Why has Google had such a miserable time implementing a usable voice calling service? It's seems relatively straightforward (on the front-end, at least) and yet we have a stream of poorly conceived offerings.

And what a stupid name for a core communications platform.

Google Talk and Google Voice in Gmail were/are a great voice calling service. Hangouts is still missing a ton of features compared to google talk, although this feature brings back one of them. I still have Hangouts disabled in favor of the old Google Talk interface on my main Gmail account so that I can see a buddy list, see logged in status, and make phone calls.

The gmail stuff is too ephemeral for me. Needs to be an app.

I don't think audio/video goes with email/chat. I think that's there's where Skype might have messed up and ceded mobile to other players.

I don't understand. I already use Hangouts to make free calls on iOS.

Yes, and when it was announced for iOS last year, they said the Hangouts-Voice integration on Android was "coming soon". It seemed to have been planned for Google I/O this year, but they ended up having it delayed until now for some reason.

Oh well, their Android and iOS Hangouts apps are now mostly at parity now.

Worse, to receive calls via Hangouts (web browser) you have to join Google+ which is complete b.s. If there's anything worse than Hangouts it's Google+. At least Hangouts is slowly getting better.

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