While Messages and RCS is how Google wants you to message friends, Google Chat also fits that role and the company today reminded us...
tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo's) successor, google chat.
google's messaging strategy has gotten so bad that they now have to remind consumers which of the apps are made for them. i myself had no clue that the google chat app in the play store was targeted towards consumers, i just assumed that the app was google workspaces only considering they always push rcs & that the play store description doesn't go two sentences without talking about enterprise & google workspaces.
it's kinda wild when you consider that they had a 17 year headstart on this & still somehow lost the messaging app/site race multiple times
This is Google's biggest problem, I think. They're so flaky on their products and services, I find myself not wanting to bother trying things out in case they don't become popular enough for Google to maintain. I saw a lot of the same remarks about Stadia, and though I seem to remember Google assuring Stadia was playing the long game, well, we see how that played out.
I enjoyed using Hangouts. I still do. But the plethora of communication apps Google makes always give me chills that the judgement day is just round the corner. And by the time it arrives, it will just end up as another name on the list without much resort.
same, back ~2015-2018 i was hangouts' biggest fan. now i avoid most google platforms in general aside from gmail, android & youtube. i can't trust anything else to stay around anymore, & even when they do keep an app alive they end up just endlessly shuffling them around like this for no reason
It's pretty hilarious how badly they've fucked this up. I have no interest in Google Chat at all because it's almost certain they'll replace it with yet another service before I even have a chance to settle in.
Seriously. I'm quite a Google maximalist (yea, I know, spare me) and a young-ish not-that-old IT nerd. But even I have lost track of which chat app is currently the supported one / the successor of all the dead ones, and how to get is / use it (well, particularly on the web). If I'm confused, I can't imagine how it is for the average internet user or old people.
Yeah, I hit a point around 2018 where I went from being a huge fan of Google’s to switching to iOS and trying to degoogle my life as much as possible (but also not wholly relying on one company for anything. I still have Google photos, but I also have local backups of all my photos, plus they’re in OneDrive and iCloud for example)
All of my friend group was on hangouts. I don't think Google realizes how monumentally stupid it was to kill off hangouts. Discord was really picking up in popularity and when hangouts died I moved the last of friend group to Discord.
Why in the fuck would I move them off discord back to Google?
Google’s promotion-pack culture strikes again. You don’t get promoted at Google for “maintaining a successful product and keeping people happy.” You do get promoted for launching a new product, even if it competes with another well-liked Google product.
So if you want to be successful at Google, you launch a new chat service.
Damn that is such a stupid way of doing things too. Eventually user goodwill depletes and you're left with a significant investment in products that don't even generate profit or good.
Why is it written with collectivist speak? "..reminds us..? Who is the "us"? The collectivist phrasing is disturbing as opposed to using objective terms.
This trend is bad for the Google brand, and I'm surprised that the higher ups there don't understand it. Why should I use a Google service and get attached to it if they are going to unexpectedly remove it entirely?
How long until Google Earth gets the axe? Or even Gmail? I'm writing this on my Google Pixel, but they could theoretically just say "naw we wanna leave the phone market" and then may not make the phone any longer or not provide OS or security updates if that is their prerogative.
For such a large tech company, they have the resources to run these services at cost in order to have their users be more valuable to them in the long term.
I'm still bitter about them completely dismantling the original Google Talk desktop application two decades ago (yes they weren't shortened to app then lol) as it was the best communication platform of its time and had very clear voice comms.
I have a hard time trying new google stuff because it seems they kill it a few years later. Google used to be amazing, now I’m highly skeptical of the company. I’ve even switched to using Bing because google searches just result in a bunch of AI shit and other SEO bullshit.
Let's all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.
I used to use Google hangouts since it worked with Pidgin and other 3rd party apps. As soon as they nuked Hangouts I spun up a Matrix instance, got all my family on it, and haven't looked back. It's been excellent.
My D&D group uses it for planning. It's basically the only context where I use it. It's suitable to the task, but doesn't really have any distinguishing features.
I always used to use allo and hangouts when I was a flight attendant as they would still send messages despite the airlines paywall for the internet on their wifi. no idea how it worked but was awesome little gimmic
I don't think I ever even heard of Allo until the news articles started coming out about Google killing it off. I used Hangouts briefly, but I didn't know a lot of people who used it. I am surprised they are trying chat again.
I always used to use Hangouts as my default chat app for friends. We had a big DnD group chat on it. But we migrated to WhatsApp when Google said they were going to kill hangouts and never looked back.
Why would I trust Google with my chats when they constantly abandon/kill off their best tools. We've now moved to Signal and I'm expecting to stay there for a long time.
@herriott101@nihilx7E3 Signal is still a walled garden that does not respect user freedom. If you want something permanent I would suggest the internet standard, XMPP.
I've seen a lot of buzz about XMPP lately (well, mostly in relation to P92 and corps killing FOSS projects). Beyond it being a comm protocol, I don't really know much about it. Is it still in use?