The bigger obstacle, of course, for Google is that Messages and RCS exists. I don’t think the company has ever laid out the difference between the two products or when you’d use one over the other.
And, yet again, we see the launch of another Google product that will shut it's doors soon.
It's unfortunate. I'm hesitant toward adopting any Google apps and services these days out of fear it'll be shuttered or drastically changed. I miss having Google Photos and Drive linked up!
Yeah, their Google Photos free forever stunt put me off Google services. These days, I've taken my contact, and calendar syncing on a self-hosted Nextcloud instance. My notes have shifted from Google to Nextcloud Notes. For Photos, Nextcloud Photos is unfortunately not up to par, so I have a Photoprism instance set up to provide the same functionality, but under my control.
If at all possible, you should definitely give Nextcloud a try!
Yes, it saw a surge in popularity after last year's protests as the government blocked Whatsapp. Telegram had already been blocked. For messaging most people still use telegram with proxies and VPNs.
They've thrown so much advocacy capital into the wind that at this point they need to offer something more than - hey look, there's a product you can use.
I recently discovered that Google Meet allows you to sync-play YouTube videos with anyone on Android as long as the one who starts the sharing session has YouTube Premium. That got me thinking though... Just how much effort has Google put into features that I don't think anybody knows about?
It's funny to think that Google Hangouts had this feature a while back. It's more than just putting effort into features; it's also implementing similar features into multiple apps at different points in time.
Yeah, it's super weird. And it's not even like they're reusing code or anything. The Hangouts version was basically embedded YouTube like we see in Discord but the current Meets implementation is within the YouTube app, which is really neat but again, why don't more people know about it?
Google should just make a web app for Messages and integrate meet for video calls. Leave Chat as a enterprise thing/Slack competitor and focus on Messages as the family + friends app.
I use meet for video chats with friends but it's so annoying having to always create a room and then send the invite link.
Still lacks a ton of features other messengers, like Telegram, have. Editing and deleting messages is nice to have, but at this point its kind of a minimum viable product
They used to be so close. Talk was great. Could use it in Adium or Pidgin or whatever else. Then they did hangouts and got close to the sms hybridization, then they killed that and it was the end.