The New Messenger App from Google

Google Delete happens. Just ask Google Reader.

With regard to the messenger stuff, there is now only Hangouts, if you do things the "Google Way" - it integrates Google Voice, Google Chat and Messenger.

This Messenger app appears to be if you don't want to use Hangouts.

I don't know what's happening inside Google right now but their products are becoming ridiculously fractured.

Android is the clearest example. They also just fractured one of their biggest, most successful products with Inbox.

This leads to an interesting paradox: Google aggressively kills or uproots projects, APIs and frameworks (Angular) with little regard for users but can't seem to apply the same ideology toward building a coherent app ecosystem.

The Drive/Sheets/Docs/Etc. split is old news at this point. That happened awhile ago. I believe the split was a good choice though. It is the difference of Microsoft Works and the individual products of Office. It allows someone who only needs to read content, like I'm sure most phone users are, to have an app for that purpose and it allows Google to iterate on the individual apps on different cycles. This means more frequent and rapid updates for the individual apps, but it can also mean fewer updates for the user if they don't have the full suite installed.

Maybe the "messenger" app should be somehow like that Blackberry 10 OS "hub" for multiple messaging apps. I don't know. But other than that, I don't think SMS should be deeply integrated into any data-based chat application.

SMS is a legacy system that has no encryption (or very weak one if you count A5/1) and we should let it die. If people focus on data-based chat apps only such as Whatsapp, at least we have a chance to kill SMS and use better encryption for our chats. SMS is also very expensive for what it really costs.

Some people have suggested that this integration have been limited by the necessity to appease the carriers. I don't think that iMessage is perfect in any way (if anything the fact that it keeps hogging your messages when you switch from iOS to Android is a big issue) but yeah I also think that it is the way to go. Ideally, nobody should care about the specific protocol used to transport the message, you should just have a contact list and be able to let the app figure it out for you. There are still some contracts where SMS messages are not unlimited though and it sounds like a nightmare to make this kind of automatic fallback without taking the risk to drain your user account. Honestly, the SMS protocol should just die in a corner though. We just need to figure out how (maybe with something similar to WhatsApp ?)

I agree, but why switch to hangouts for SMS at all? I just kept the stock app as default for SMS. I really hate going into hangouts at all, I don't know what I'll do when they disable the XMPP bridge. My main medium of communication with my friends is Hangouts on Pidgin for the desktop, and I'm not looking forward to moving to some chrome app.

Is this not the same app that is in Android 5.0 AOSP?

Hangouts looks pretty 'Material' to me, and has got its updated look quite early before lollipop.

Hangouts can be downloaded on its own from the Play Store too can't it - not sure what the angle is for Messenger...other than no Google Account.... strange

Yeah I'm really starting to get annoyed with this.

The most painful part is thinking back to when I signed up for my Google Voice number. The promise seemed so great. A single number that Google would control and allow me to forward to any phone. At the time I thought Google were the guys who get it, the guys I'd want to have controlling my number for years to come. And they'd let me text using my browser too!! A hugely useful feature.

And YET here we are. hangouts is the most dysfunctional chat experience I've ever seen. It's like a normal chat client crossed with Bonzi Buddy. But I have to use it to get GV texts on my browser.

I think the saddest part is that my number hasn't actually changed once since I got GV.

:(

We did, but a lot of users (and apparently several carriers) wanted a messaging platform for SMS/MMS that wasn't tied into Google's messaging platform so they made this (which is basically just the SMS/MMS part).

I can definitely see how multiple apps that are so similar would be annoying or seemingly redundant. Still, the whole point of the Android platform has always seemed (to me) to be flexibility and options even if it's at the expense of simplicity or streamlining. iOS seems to address the market on the other side of that demand and is biased toward simplicity and streamlining at the expense of flexibility. I guess it's one way to differentiate on the software side if nothing else.

Hangouts integrated with GV! Or at least it did for me, it was a month or two ago. It still has some annoying usability aspects compared to the old GV app but I can at least send and receive texts to my GV number in hangouts.

If you want to make it explicit, you can set up Hangouts to move your actual phone number to a separate "account" for only SMS, which leaves the only phone number from your gmail as your GV number.

It's worked pretty well for me, at least on Android. The Hangouts replacement for the web client is garbage, though.

From that post: Jabber and XMPP were full of promise, sure — if you bought into the “let’s build decentralized, interoperable services” Kool-Aid.

I think that article makes a lot of good points, but I am not sure why the author takes such a negative attitude towards that Jabber/XMPP "Kool-Aid". If successful, essentially all the other issues they complain about would be solved. You would not need to worry about iMessage grabbing your phone number or WhatsApp selling your contacts' information. With Off-the-Record messaging, you would have secure chats. The open standard would enable different clients with different features, some of which would undoubtably be battery life and data plan friendly.

I guess the main purpose is to update the UI of the default android messenger.

I think you can still use Hangouts for SMS messages just fine. I've heard the main reason Google made this app was to please US carriers who want to push a standalone SMS app so people spend more sending SMS messages instead of saving money when on wifi.

I imagine that the idea of this app is that it take over from the previous AOSP messaging app, much like Chrome > Browser, and Photos > Gallery.

It's just Google's continuation of keeping everything under their roof.

It's practically a killer feature for me - so useful when meeting up with someone, and en route. I'd like to see it go further: let me message a temporary location tracker, so I can share my location with someone for, say, an hour, without having to enable stalking-mode permanently.

Google's email app on iOS currently suffers the worst of two worlds:

i) no rich text editing

ii) it keeps the format of pasted text

This means you can't bold headings, and you can't unbold a sentence that you paste in.

The work-around -- compose messages in a different app to cut and paste in -- is sub optimal.

Surely if you're on Hacker News you have some idea of how software development works, and that Google doesn't have a single team working on all their Android apps. Releasing something like this is unlikely to have diverted people away from GMail.

Instaedit: Sorry, that had a really harsh tone to it. I was just surprised to see that sort of post here, as opposed to Facebook where I can almost get that people believe there's a few people doing absolutely everything, and any thread is a valid dumping ground for the grievances.

What about the energy spent writing HN comments criticizing others for making useless things?

> Doesn't the Play store disallow apps with the same name by default?

No.

It's not the same name; the other is called "Facebook Messenger".

There's also Yahoo Messenger, WhatsApp Messenger, Tango Messenger, Smug Messenger and a couple of plain "Messengers" already, so I doubt any lawsuits will have a leg to stand on.

I'd rather hope that no lawsuit for a word as ambiguous as "Messenger" would ever make it past the laugh test...

...but I'm regularly disappointed.