The best part about Wave was that it was/is federated, so your data isn't completely siloed like basically every other modern app mentioned in this thread. It's more like e-mail. With sufficient resourcing, it could have revolutionized communication.
I heard over the grape vine that wave was killed in political maneuvers of management (as they deliberately did not build integrations into email for wave, thus causing adoption issues).
The tech is incredibly good! It had so much potential, and yet...
Its turned into a massive joke. They can create amazing machine learning and AI systems, can't put together a consistent chat app - stuff thats been around since the beginning of the Internet.
I think that joke must include a dozen highly skilled but poorly socialized engineers in a conference room completely failing to communicate about communicating.
I'm just not sure if it's a comedy, a satire or a tragedy.
It has to hurt somewhere inside Google to kill Allo but not Duo. I honestly expected the opposite given the original push behind these apps. The problem with all these messaging experiences is that none of them work well on both dekstop and mobile. They seem to be optimized one way or the other.
If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.
Hangout was good but it feels like Google whiteanted this product in the hope people would head to Allo/Duo. While in reality they just pushed people away completely.
I find it amazing how these decisions are made... it seems like most people here could see the train wreck coming from this at the beginning. Are the descion makers that bad? Did no-one have the guts to discuss how bad these things looked or were they arrogant enought to feel they can fly above market sentiment... I always find it interesting how bad decisions are made in such seemingly obvious circumstances.
I suspect the problem with hangouts is that it's free. The new gsuite meeting, or whatever it's called, looks a lot like an upgraded version of hangouts, but you have to pay for it. (Pay for gsuite)
Telegram is a horrible UI experience. It lacks a useful buddy list, is bandwidth-intensive, and one of its biggest selling points, encryption, almost nobody uses because it is resource-intensive junk and can even slow a computer down enough that 1990s DOOM has issues keeping a solid framerate.
The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words.
Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop.
Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.
You're onto something. This should be a chart though, and encompass the whole scope of Google's attempts at messaging over the years. Plot out all the bundling (Hangouts & G+) and unbundling (Allo's features -> Messages) like xkcd's movie narrative charts: https://xkcd.com/657/
At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.
Same. I adore hangouts, ugly and 'outdated' as it is. With Fi/Voice, it integrates perfectly as to call or text from any internet device. And who cares about wifi calling or volte support when with hangouts, everything is over data always and more reliable. Killing it is a mistake. It's the only Google product I'd gladly pay a monthly fee to use...
I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed over time. Also, it's important to distinguish Allo from Hangouts from the account perspective. Allo is phone # tied, like WhatsApp/Telegram. So definitely trying to go after a different market segment. It just failed.
Duo continues to be awesome. Being a FaceTime competitor that is cross-platform is great. No account needed, just simply start a video chat from your address book (or from the App).
Hangouts is... something special. There are clearly reasons things happened the way they did. But I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.
Hangouts integrates your Google Voice and Google Fi texts right into web pages like GMail, contacts, etc.
And this works even if your phone is off, lost, broken, or has no service. Hangouts also works on any device with an internet connection if you log in. You can text and call from your number on literally any device just by signing into hangouts. None of the multitude of other redundant Google messaging products does any of this. Even their official replacement "messages" only works if your phone is on and has service.
You don't even need a phone to call and text from a laptop through GMail from your phone number. That functionality will be lost.
This makes no sense to me - why not integrate texts into Google Sheets or Google Maps? This feels like pushing unrelated projects to boost engagement. iMessage does not invade my email.
Didn't Google get badly burned integrating chat into gmail (Google buzz)?
What you said doesnt make sense is actually easy to get hooked up onto. I get a phone call, and i can answer it from my laptop, or it goes to voice mail and i get a transcript. It is amazing.
This is what bugs me. It's not an overly complicated idea, and I feel many users would actually pay for it. Why has nobody tried? When I search for alternatives, I only find business offerings, with worse functionality.
I just want to use my provider for data. Lemme call and text via the web/app, keep my number safe, and my money is yours...
imessages cannot send sms over data; only iPhone to iPhone messages. Hangouts can send a standard sms to any number from anywhere in the world using WiFi/data for free. This is a huge feature that doesn't get enough press.
The question was for kyrra specifically. I have Google Fi and I really enjoy hangouts. The "... something special" was what I was interested in, specifically I was interested in an insider's POV.
Yeah this really bums me out because a lot of the time I just use Gmail on my laptop as my phone. Do you know any other services that have this type of functionality?
I agree with you 100%. Most of the time when I'm receiving a text I'm sitting in front of my computer with a Gmail tab open. So the ability to text back directly from my computer (with a full size keyboard) is absolutely the killer feature of Hangouts integrating the Google Voice/Fi phone number.
I simply cannot imagine using anything else. Those who haven't experienced this workflow don't know what they are missing.
I do 200-400 texts weekly and this saves me easily 1 hour per week in gained efficiency (context switching, fumbling with phone fingerprint unlocking, composing text on small phone keyboard...)
> So the ability to text back directly from my computer (with a full size keyboard) is absolutely the killer feature of Hangouts integrating the Google Voice/Fi phone number.
Another Google Fi user here. To be clear (since this was a shock when I learned it this morning) - you can text from your computer with a full size keyboard with Android Messages now. It's just more WhatsApp-style where it's paired with your phone, so you need to have your phone on and working. It also isn't integrated right into Gmail. So it's not as nice but it's got the "killer feature" of texting from your computer (which, I agree, is killer) at least.
It's interesting to remember that it was born out eating multiple existing services (GChat/GoogleTalk, Huddle, and some other things probably). When it launched, it was trying to cleanup Google's fragmented text/video messaging strategy.
One funny thing is how message history search worked. There is no in-app searching history. You can search on the Gmail desktop client and see history, but no where else (no mobile app. Not in Inbox. No-where but gmail desktop).
Along the way they added SMS support for it, which they later scrapped for everyone except Project Fi/Voice customers.
Hangouts has done a lot in the last 5.5 years (since its launch). It may have tried to do too much, which may have caused some problems (especially on usability).
Hangouts Chat and Meet seem to try to start fresh and build a good product focused on business customers. How that plays out for normal gmail consumers has yet to be seen; I'm really hoping they do a good job with it.
Allo is an awful product that should never have been greenlit. It was a huge step back on Google's core mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessibleand useful." Not only could you not search your chat history from other devices, but you couldn't even use it from other devices at launch, and even when that was fixed, it was clunky.
Much better would have been to attach phone numbers to Hangouts, similar to how iMessage ties phone numbers to Apple IDs.
Allo was so unpolished compared to whatsapp/telegram att it was hilarious,you def drank the koolaid too much. every indian i met treated it with disdain.
I'd love to hear why you think it was unpolished. I've talked with a number of people (both Googler's and other tech people) that liked the product (at least where it was going).
My problems with it were:
* It used the "phone is the source of truth" like Whatsapp, but it didn't go with always-on encryption (so they could do Google assistant in it).
* They didn't launch with a desktop web client, which it eventually got (and I really like it).
* It didn't launch with any kind of backup/restore system, though it eventually got it (so you could move to new phones).
Things I liked:
* Encrypted chats (incognito mode) worked well and had expiring messages.
* The Overall UX/UI for the mobile app and Desktop are (in my opinion) better than all the other messaging apps out there (except maybe iMessage). (Though I don't use any FB products.)
* It was on iOS and Android, and had the same features on both.
i don't remember now and it seems impossible to find an article with my list of complaints but:
1. feature parity wasn't there. i already have whatsapp,you're asking me to move. feature parity would be minimum requirement
2. it didn't auto discover people like whatsapp does(or atleast it didn't when i tried it initially), people needed to sign up for it adding friction to an already unpleasant process of getting people to switch
3. duo wasn't in allo and allo wasn't in duo. if there had been just one app it would have had a greater value prop(at the time) of chats with video chatting. instead there was a whole 'nother app to manage. once whatsapp announced voice calls(followed by video) getting anyone to "allo/duo" was absurd
4.i remember number porting was buggy in some way, just flat out didn't work for 2 days
can't remember the rest but i remember something about the emojis bugging me(google implementation different from whatsapp) and being unable to send pdfs
it needed to compete from day one not "find it's feet" gradually. i find this to be a problem with all google products really
What you see as throwing shit at the wall, looks like testing market hypothesis to me.
Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.
Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.
It seems like Duo is working out. It has more than 500m installs, and isn't installed by default, so it's numbers aren't padded the same way Hangouts' are.
Allo, despite being shut down got to about the same size as Signal.
Is hangouts installed by default (i don't know), seem to have a billion installs, which looked a bit too high for both default-install, and non-default install.
It's installed by default on most Android devices, and a large portion of Asia's handset market (India) is dominated by Android, but messaging in India is dominated by Whatsapp. So almost-a-billion is bloated download numbers of Indian smartphones coming with hangouts installed, but none of them using it.
Google has been working on chat for well over a decade. At what point do they stop "testing market hypothesis" and build the product people want to use?
I don't want to be a Google tester (market or beta), and certainly not for years on end. I don't care about "opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on". Just build one good chat system.
In the areas where Google excels, they didn't get there by applying this throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy. The design of Google Search wasn't the result of 13 years of betas. What do you do when nothing sticks?
If they can stumble around for this long and still feel the need to test half a dozen possible strategies, maybe the correct conclusion is that, unlike Search or Maps, Google doesn't really have anything as a company to offer this product category, and they should just get out and focus on areas where they can contribute.
Hopping from text to video in a single click is cool...
But the #1 thing that stops me from even considering buying an Android device is "it's not iMessage".
iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic. No hassle at all and I can blue bubble send perfection to any other iPhone-r. It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly.
I think that's what is really missing. People don't mind opening another app to place call / facetime / hangout video. They want simple, clear phone messaging that isn't an "app"
That's basically Hangouts. I sms more from my computer than my phone but it's all synced everywhere. I'm even smsing with a co-worker from my tablet right now.
Sure but I am talking about the quality of product and the vision. There is coherence. Gchat works everywhere but is not well integrated with anything.
Disclaimer: there are no ios devices in my house and I am android guy all the way. But wow does messaging suck compared to ios world
Your "That's basically Hangouts" arrangements statement is true when it comes to:
>It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly.
But as for Hangouts being flawless messaging and not just some buggy app, I have to disagree.
Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.
Clearly that aren't doing something properly and I feel quality of the app has degraded as their efforts go elsewhere, viz. Allo, messages, etc.
Hangouts is flawless on the browser on my laptop though.
I've only ever had this happen on very very patchy internet connections. Usually when there's a captive portal that I haven't logged into (so the app doesn't know it's being blackholed).
>Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.
I have a Pixel 2, with Project Fi, and haven't ever really had this issue.
I suspect they mean that once you've logged in with your Apple ID, which is pretty much required to use an iOS device beyond the stock apps, iMessage and FaceTime both get set up.
So, if setting up a phone for nana, you take it out of the box, set her up with an Apple ID, put it back in the box, send it to her, she takes it out of the box, and then you call or text her, all she has to do is answer the call. No futzing with downloading the right app, no having to make sure the person on the other end is using the same chat service; just doing it.
You cannot make everybody happy, i guess. If google opted in everyone to hangouts by default, people would go crazy (see chrome opting you into google accounts).
I mean, it's not like it'd be terribly hard to have an initial setup screen asking if you'd like to use Hangouts or not. I wouldn't trust Google not to make it seem mandatory, though. Or to put it in just to please Europe but in actual fact just breeze past it.
A friend on iOS think he has sent you a (SMS) text message.
You don't get it on your (non-apple) phone.
You don't get it on your (non-apple) work computer.
Three weeks later you log on to your iMac/mac-mini/whatever that you hardly ever use to find messages from whoever uses apple phones and has your email address on their contacts. It turns out that logging in to your desktop PC can link your AppleId (email address) to iMessage and start swallowing your text messages. You can only rectify this setting on an apple computer.
(Yes, I know I'm an edge case but I will never see iMessage as a good thing, walled gardens can suck).
Somehow, I wonder if google is “just” very strong at analyzing vast amounts of data, but weak on core product development. Do they ask questions like who is this for, who will use this, for what purpose, how will they use it etc?
It definitely seems Google is bad at Product Design, but certainly they do not lack for the best talent, so is the problem based upon the structure of the org, stakeholders, something else, both, neither?
It's lack of vision. There are not many in the company who strives for the best product, or have the vision to make a change. As the company got larger, people started caring for more about career and less about great products. People who solve for some director's problem got promoted over the ones who truly deserved it.
Unfortunately, some of the smartest people i know now also looks down on google. This one kid that was an intern for me at MIT (whom i think was way smarter than i am) didn't even bother interviewing with google, he went to spacex.
It really seems like the company must be lacking top-down leadership. It almost seems cliché to bring up Steve Jobs here, but the contrast is striking. One could argue he took things too far the other way: There was one iPhone. It was the perfect size. Hell, there was one mouse button. It was the correct number of buttons. For everyone. But still, it's laughable to imagine this kind of fractured insanity happening at Apple, and for the most part that was to their benefit.
People underestimate the importance of leadership all the time. Google is a company built around being the smartest person in the room, but where are the leaders? A good leader is not necessarily the smartest (in a Google sense) person in the room. How does that person get put in a leadership position in a company like Google?
You mention Jobs. Was he smarter than Woz or a better engineer? No, but he was a much better leader. He inspired people to work, and relentlessly drove his vision. Obviously he didn't always make the right call, but I think we can say with confidence he would not have let this messaging mess drag on for close to 10 years now.
This seems to me the start of what happened to GMail. As for Hangouts, it seems that this announcement suggests that Hangouts is moving to become a primarily G Suite brand.
Messaging:
you have what you have now,
Messages as a vanilla messaging app
Allo and Duo as flavored products focusing on particular features for messaging.
Email:
GMail as vanilla
Inbox as a GTD-flavored that is having its most used features is being folded back into GMail.
I honestly have no idea what this means for fi. We were made to move over to Hangouts so we could sms from Gmail or something and now it seems to be going away?
Bummer, isn't it? That was my favorite feature to be honest.
I think there's a lack of connection between Fi and google's other chat products (or even just hangouts and fi) in terms of roadmaps and so on. Fi graduated, now hangouts going away seems a bit... reverse.
At some point in the last year, I wanted to jump into the "new chat ecosystem" and so I uninstalled hangouts to break bad habits. The entire phone becomes unable to connect to any network.
I love hangouts, and I wish RCS could just roll into it; but how did project fi end up so integrated?
Originally I had it uninstalled. I recently reinstalled it to use for a completely separate Google Voice account, but before that I had it uninstalled and I exclusively used Messages.
Messages mixes up SMS with chat, exactly what I don't want. SMS messages are usually used for couriers notifying about delivery, and spam. I use an SMS-only app on Android to make sure things don't get mixed up. I don't need SMS junk in my chats.
This. If Fi integration with Hangouts goes away without a replacement, I'm cancelling my Fi service and switching to Pinger Textfree Web for text messaging.
I saw the title and thought: "Finally, they're going to admit to what a mess they've created and propose a way forward". But nope, just a PR fluff post.
The last time I used messages it made a point not to let me chose if I wanted to use SMS vs google own protocol, and I felt I was a weapon for google to bring more users to their ecosystem.
The last time I used hello and duo they needed either a phone or a smartphone or both.
For me a messaging system should not require to have a phone number and should equally well across a range of devices including Linux desktop.
Hangouts and zoom can do it, why would other apps not do it?
Hangouts Chat is a standalone, text chat-only app (chat.google.com), similar in functionality to Slack. It will/does have the ability for third-party developers to create bots, etc.
Hangouts Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" type of communications. Both of these (according to this blog) will only be available to G Suite (enterprise) users.
> Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others"
Yeah, no. Meet is the most equal-among-all video conferencing app I've ever seen. It's ability to promote the speaker to the main window is uncannily good. It is my go-to, and I use it intercontinental and inter-org.
1. Hangouts Chat is a text chat app more like slack then anything. Meet is video conferencing like Zoom or Webex.
2. Duo is a video calling app like Facetime or Skype.
I may need to read that mess several more times to understand what they're doing, but from what I gather if I just want to do video chat with family with Google stuff, I'll need to use their "Duo" app. Does anyone use that and know if it also works in a browser (preferably Firefox)?
What a joke of a blog post, and what a joke of a company. This isn’t “the latest.” It’s the latest deprecation, and the latest breach of implied warranty to the consumer.
When google voice was introduced, I ported my phone number. It was nice to use the service. Before that, I had a grandstream ATA. The service was great.
Now, everyday feels worse. Last month, I was traveling abroad and had more important things to do than to confirm the cellular number linked to voice was still mine. So google decided not just to stop redirecting phonecalls, but also to stop me from calling using the dialer app.
Basically, my "phone privileges" was unilaterally revoked by google because I did not obey the phone number verification procedure.
I have previously checked companies like callcentric, but it is now one of my priority. I can't entrust google with my phone service in 2019.
So basically - "If you need to do video calling, use Duo. If you need to send messages Android to Android use Android Messaging. If you need a cross platform messaging service outside of enterprise use Hango...ooops"
I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling?
For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.
The main reason I still use Google Meet is that appear.in has a full-fat P2P model where your video and audio must stream to every user and vice versa. Even with 4 people that can get pretty taxing on a poor connection.
Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.
Never heard of this before, but it looks awesome! Do you know if rooms expire after a certain amount of time? If so I might install it on my server and have a forever running meeting.
Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.
Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations.
Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like.
I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.
I don't think the problem is even one app. They should have had a central board where people set interoperability standards then they can build multiple apps. As long as hangouts could talk with Allo etc it doesn't matter and people can use the one they prefer and it's irelevant to another person's descion.
Now Google have dug a deeper hole as there is little change any tech influencer is going to use or promote Google messaging apps to their circle.
Personally I'm available on Signal, Skype and WhatsApp and it's going to take a hell of a change to make me care about trying something else.
It's like nobody at Google uses an iPhone or has heard of Facetime. "Oh look, there's an app that lets you call and at a tap of a button turns that call into video! I wonder if we should do something similar?" "- nah, that would be too easy."
I've had that for 10 years with google. I don't understand. I look at a contact while in gmail, click on it to go to hangouts and click the video call button.
It's so many things Google can't decide what they want.
Almost all their Google services are login-based. Your gmail login works on search, on youtube, on calendar, on anything really. Yes. On Hangouts too.
But not Allo/Duo. Someone thought it would be hipper to throw that out the window and have people use their phone number instead. Cool. Sure. But why make that the only choice for almost a year?
It really is that simple. It's really shocking that a company like Google has failed over and over at this.
Apple nailed it on the first try. Both iMessage and FaceTime.
What's more frustrating is that Google had Google Talk. It was super successful and really well liked. Rather than maintain and improve it, they threw it away.
one of the greatest advantages google has is gmail/hangouts native integration in the browser. if they lose that, i think a good bit of what makes gmail attractive goes with it.
If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.
Yes and no. You can use their Messages web client, but it's still going to be SMS to and from your phone. It's a contrived and pretty ugly solution IMO.
Good grief. It seems like they are doing everything possible to not make something as good as Apple Messages. Data chat without a phone number, interoperability with conventional SMS and the ability to start an instant FaceTime. And with Group FaceTime, it’s even more compelling. You can even do audio only or start a real phone call or send a video or audio message, all in one place. Other than org politics, I can’t understand why Google messaging services are a convoluted mess. I need a flowchart just to understand it all.
What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete them.
That doesn’t count all of the iOS people that also use Signal. I use Signal and Apple Messages and didn’t even know Allo existed. I have a perhaps irrational fear of using messaging from Google or Facebook because they have lost my trust.
Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?
Why do people ever switch chat apps? Besides shutdowns, it's because the new app does something the old one doesn't. Signal's pitch was easy encrypted messaging, but now there are apps that fill that slot, even Facebook Messenger has e2e encrypted chat, so there's not a lot of reason for Google to invest there.
Google Duo has succeeded as an app known for making video calls, which is as much a marketing/positioning achievement as it is a technical one.
There are lots of people declaring they will use a Google product in this thread, but of course no one is going to use a nonexistent product that people imagine as a clone of what already exists. Unless Google finds an "in", they're not going to get anywhere, even with whatever perfect app HN imagines.
I can't deal with how signal desktop works. I DO NOT want messaging tied to my phone. I want it tied to an account that works wherever I sign in. I'd love to use Signal, but can't deal with that.
signal on desktop it's next to useless and good luck sharing pictures through signal, which it's basic functionality they haven't fixed for years, who is fine with sharing pictures one by one? what is this 90s?
I'm pretty sure this blog post was forced due to the recent articles about Hangouts and Allo on 9to5google.com [0], [1].
Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution.
If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now.
> Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person
Isn't that recursive thinking? No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.
> I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol
I'm curious, but could RCS be interchangeably used both through provider and through a host such as Google? Could Google not host their own RCS backend?
> No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.
You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.
It's also very unreliable if you're messaging abroad. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If you're roaming and so is the other person, it becomes even trickier. At least data works and within the EU is pretty much free.
" more expensive almost everywhere outside the US."
It's (sms/texting) free (http://mobile.free.fr/) and unlimited on a 2 euros monthly phone subscription with 2 hours of voice communication in France. That makes it the cheapest way to communicate at all, here. Cheaper than voice and much cheaper than internet data. Even the absolute poorest of the country can use texting. It's more accessible than DATA driven apps and can run on dumb phones.
>No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.
No, noone uses it because it doesn't use data. I walk into a supermarket and lose signal so I can't SMS anymore. I can use the wifi to send messages even without signal.
Yes, I know there are SMS over Wifi apps, but they're proprietary and usually require signal to enable.
It doesn't matter why, the fact of the matter is that no one uses SMS in these places, which is also true wherever I've lived.
People use Whatsapp primarily, or facebook messenger, or (in my bubble anyway, not so widespread) Telegram. These products have the network effect already established, and no one is likely to go back to crappy SMS, even if it is dressed up.
Yeah I still use it. I never used a messaging app post gtalk. So many different platforms, it just became a nightmare.
I am still after a lovely opensource cross-platform simple distributed secure messaging and video platform.
I'd read that Allo was being abandoned for Messages. And I'd never heard of Duo until this post. Very confused naming and products at Google. I was trying to get my head around the differences between Play Music and Youtube Music yesterday - a case in point.
Other articles have indicated that Google is going the RCS route because they don’t want to rock the boat with mobile carriers, who do not want to see a proprietary chat system like iMessage on their networks.
I don't use Android's Messages for SMS, I installed a special-purpose SMS app specifically to avoid mixing Internet-based messages with SMS-based messages. I have zero interest in intermixing the two.
Google is discountinuing Allo next year. I have never been affected by one of these decisions by Google since I try to stay away from their ecosystem, but I am confident this is a way to lose user trust.
I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up?
I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal.
In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be.
I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.
And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.
And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.
And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...
On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.
I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said.
What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)
EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
This is the brilliance of iMessage where it gets critical mass- fallback to SMS but pushing the iMessage identity tied to an account that follows you to new phones/devices.
I think that iMessage network effect is a big reason for the steady market share growth of iPhone in the US- none of the competitive apps have cross-generational appeal, just iMessage.
If email and SMS was invented today, they wouldn't be open and decentralized. Everything is locked and centralized nowadays, since everything is tied to accounts at companies wanting to make money of of you. It's the current state of the Internet, a world wide open network with siloed incompatible services.
I'm actually contemplating ICQ, it's still around and looks no worse than any other service. Matrix might be a better solution though, it's federated and open. https://matrix.org/blog/home/
ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, PawWaw, Yahoo Messenger, Odigo, (and 30 more names I can't remeber) - there was a huge instant messaging war, the first stage of which was decidedly won by AOL (with AIM and the purchase of ICQ), but Microsoft later made great headway through sheer monopoly force and persistence - but that eventually became irrelevant with SMS taking over as the main form of instant messaging and then WhatsApp taking the world by storm.
None of this was open source. Not a single one of the successful messengers. In fact, AOL fought alternative clients fiercely all the time, and Microsoft started fighting them as soon as they got non-trivial market share.
What about XMPP (Which started life as Jabber before being standardized?)? Well, that one is open source. But it only survived and flourished because all the commercial outfits were busy fighting each other.
I was tangentially involved with the failed instant messaging standardization process at the turn of the millennium, and Jabber was by far the worst technical proposal at the time -- but the process was political, and when the committee disbanded due to all the political infighting, Jabber, which didn't have the commercial interests, was the remaining option.
I agree with you, but a hardware specific messaging app is just stupid.
As you can tell by the length of my last post, thinking about this situation has got me upset.
So upset, that right now I've decided to launch a non-profit, open collective organization called OOMA. Only One Messaging App.
OOMA will be comprised of the millions of people who are annoyed and upset at the result of tech companies competing for our communication. We are taking things into our own hands. We are agreeing to switch to ONE service, for ALL of our messaging needs. All of us, all over the world, all at once.
We are going to do 5 things, in order:
1. Choose a switch date.
2. Define a spec for the "perfect messaging app" (encryption, licensing, finance model, features, tech, etc.)
3. Invite companies to pitch their app, and/or secure funding to develop our own to spec.
4. Spread the word.
5. Make the switch.
I'm going to prepare a marketing web page and (ironically) a discord server right now. At the very worst it's a fun side project and way to express my anger.
EDIT: OOMA server is live. If you think an app is not the solution, come tell us why: https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
I would say that would not be done by "an app", nor "a service with an API exposed", but by "a protocol" that other/most/all apps follow. Jabber/XMPP comes to mind, so does Matrix.
> a hardware specific messaging app is just stupid.
What's the old phrase? If it looks stupid but it works, its not stupid. Say hello to the world's most valuable public company and what is commonly regarded as the world's highest quality messaging network.
A truth technologists hate hearing: You cannot, under any circumstances, solve problems created by code by creating more code.
Right, building another messaging app is not the right approach. But choosing one of the many existing solutions, and somehow convincing all of my social circle to move to it-- that's the problem I want to solve! Has anyone done it before?
It's hardware specific! Most of the planet is on Android. If there is a way to do iMessage on Android, I can at least say that not many people know how.
The only “green” people I know are google employees and my mom, who can’t afford an iPhone. The solution is simple to their problem- buy an iPhone.
It’s almost like the iPhone is a fetish or totem that grants access to iMessage (although you can message from macos or iCloud.com impractically).
It’s quite strange how this is a very simple, solved, problem for iPhone for many years. Google can fix it by literally cloning iMessage and arguing with carriers. They don’t. I suspect it’s because they want to be the only one with access to the cleartext and they aren’t willing to make a consumer-focused decision to keep all messages ciphertext.
So “most of the planet” has to suffer Google’s anti-consumer decision.
Okay, your experience is ... not representative. In this world there are tons of people using iphones, tons of other people using android. You see both frequently. There happen to be way more people using android but it doesn't matter, because there are sizable numbers using both, we should only consider solutions that work on both.
I agree, it’s not representative at all. But my point is that android users have problems because of the device they buy. There are likely trade offs. But google doesn’t want to solve this problem on a way that customers want.
It’s like buying a diesel vehicle and then complaining that the hybrid systems suck for them. Don’t buy a diesel if you want hybrid engines. Or work with the manufacturer to change their incentive model.
But google is an ad company and is unlikely to make products where it is hard to sell ads.
I don't get your response. You have an app that only works on Apples, so you are basically suggesting that they should abandon android. But other people probably have an app that they require that is not on iphones. There are many different chat apps with billions of users that didn't come from Google and work on androids. Google is not stealing your text messages, if that's what you are thinking somehow.
I worked around the problem you describe by getting a google voice number and using that at the front end for my real numbers. My GV# is the face for whatsapp, telegram, whatever asks for my number. Also helps that I can send and receive sms over data or WiFi anywhere in the world.
Doesn’t work with some sms gateways that don’t y’all GV, but the best international I know.
Each country gets a new sim with a local number for data and local texts but I never give it out.
I tried this a few years ago, it only worked for American customers. But it did save me some money making calls. Last I checked they basically abandoned their mobile app for a near decade...
The GV app is usable again recently - it was never really abandoned, just not given any major attention for a while. It did lose the "call back" option, which is a bummer.
However, installing the Hangouts client will let you use it as a better GV app for every day use (messages/voice, for settings and stuff you still need the GV app or the GV website).
The mobile app is poor, but can send texts and push text alerts to me.
I think GV is limited to US numbers and you have to have a US number to sign up.
It places a burden on my contacts who want to send an sms because they have to use international rates. But it’s better than not being able to text me.
Until you find the ultimate solution (good luck), here's my practical solution:
1) Port your US number to Google Voice for a one time fee of $25 ; from now on, you can use this number to forward to your new verizon number (also: T-Mobile had much better plans for only a few months at a time, every single time I checked).
2) Get service in Europe from an Illiad affiliated phone company; At least in the past, that included free US numbers you could forward your US google voice to freely -- as well as 15-45 days of free US roaming service. Maybe these offers are gone now - you could just pay $1/month or so to LocalPhone or a similar company to do that forwarding for you.
3) Buy the cheapest Android handset running a recent version (for security updates); I got a new Meizu m6 for ~$90, you could probably go lower for 1st hand or get a 2nd hand at $40 or so.
4) When travelling, switch SIMs between main phone and cheap phone, set up forwarding (directly if included in plan, or through LocalPhone or similar if not), and keep cheap phone on WiFi only, plugged in charging at home, and mostly accessible for when needed.
5) Use WhatsApp web on the new phone to continue using old WhatsApp number. Less than ideal - messages don't pop up - but it works well.
For about $100 one time[0], and about $1/month or so, you could to keep both numbers fully functional and working indefinitely.
[0] Ok, so you'll have to upgrade the cheap phone for security reasons every few years. So not exactly one time, but possible $20/year amortized, or free if you don't trade-in your old main phone and just let it rot like many people do.
And if your "Only One Messaging App" is a monoculture proprietary product with dubious profit goals than you can count me, and large swaths of tech minded people, out.
The only way forward is either Matrix or something like it. And even then you need enough momentum to bend all the walled gardens of Google / MS / FB / etc to have to play ball with a common federated protocol. Good luck getting that without the ludicrous budgets the market leaders have to throw at trying to force everyone into their own proprietary chat bubble.
We almost had that in the mid 2000s and the Google jumped ship first to Hangouts. They basically started this whole mess by going from a time where MSN Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk were all speaking the same XMPP language. Since then all three have gone total proprietary with design decisions around locking people in than providing a useful product.
Some things are fine to have proprietary giants trying to fight for your eyeballs over, such as entertainment. But communication should be something we can agree on, as a society. This is the kind of thing we should have international interoperable standards on. Email was a lucky break that SMTP and IMAP ended up being mandatory, because even today Google is trying their damn hardest to implement Gmail in anything other but an interoperable way but know it would destroy their product to ever turn the compatibility off.
I agree. But I can think of two alternatives that you don't mention:
1. A centralized and proprietary system, but with a transparent and non-profit governance structure. I understand the costs and technical challenges of global communication are bigger than say, wikipedia... but is it impossible?
2. The power of collective action. Communications apps don't put users first because we have no bargaining power. What would they do for us if we threatened to leave, en-mass (or vice versa, if enough people offered to collectively adopt their solution?).
And honestly, the problem might be better approached as a personal, social one: I don't care what the world uses, how do I get my social and professional circle to adopt one single solution?
This is more what I have in mind with "Only One Messaging App". We've grown 800% in the last quarter, so keep an eye out for us :P
401 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadThe tech is incredibly good! It had so much potential, and yet...
I'm just not sure if it's a comedy, a satire or a tragedy.
getting tired of the inconsistencies experienced with hangouts.
If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.
I find it amazing how these decisions are made... it seems like most people here could see the train wreck coming from this at the beginning. Are the descion makers that bad? Did no-one have the guts to discuss how bad these things looked or were they arrogant enought to feel they can fly above market sentiment... I always find it interesting how bad decisions are made in such seemingly obvious circumstances.
Surely you don't mean fast, cross-platform and saves chat? Because google talk is dead
[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/10/07/google-is-demoting-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/7/13202866/google-hangouts-... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/72lpsk/how_come_go... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_mobile_services
Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop.
Disclaimer, google employee in an unrelated product.
Yeah, there's clarity at the end, but there could have been a cartoon in 4 frames:
Frame 1: icons of Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Messaging
Frame 2: Hangouts splits into Meet and Chat (5 things)
Frame 3: Duo, Messaging, Meet annd Chat arranged in a 2x2 grid of (messaging, phone/video) x (consumer, business), with Allo still hanging above
Frame 4: Allo getting squeezed into Messaging.
At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.
Based on one of the most famous visualizations of all times - Napoleon's 1812 invasion of russia
How is hangouts ugly or outdated? I've heard this from several people and I don't know to what y'all are referring.
I have no particular love or hate for hangouts, I'm just curious.
I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed over time. Also, it's important to distinguish Allo from Hangouts from the account perspective. Allo is phone # tied, like WhatsApp/Telegram. So definitely trying to go after a different market segment. It just failed.
Duo continues to be awesome. Being a FaceTime competitor that is cross-platform is great. No account needed, just simply start a video chat from your address book (or from the App).
Hangouts is... something special. There are clearly reasons things happened the way they did. But I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.
Would you, please, elaborate?
And this works even if your phone is off, lost, broken, or has no service. Hangouts also works on any device with an internet connection if you log in. You can text and call from your number on literally any device just by signing into hangouts. None of the multitude of other redundant Google messaging products does any of this. Even their official replacement "messages" only works if your phone is on and has service.
You don't even need a phone to call and text from a laptop through GMail from your phone number. That functionality will be lost.
Didn't Google get badly burned integrating chat into gmail (Google buzz)?
What you said doesnt make sense is actually easy to get hooked up onto. I get a phone call, and i can answer it from my laptop, or it goes to voice mail and i get a transcript. It is amazing.
I just want to use my provider for data. Lemme call and text via the web/app, keep my number safe, and my money is yours...
I simply cannot imagine using anything else. Those who haven't experienced this workflow don't know what they are missing.
I do 200-400 texts weekly and this saves me easily 1 hour per week in gained efficiency (context switching, fumbling with phone fingerprint unlocking, composing text on small phone keyboard...)
Another Google Fi user here. To be clear (since this was a shock when I learned it this morning) - you can text from your computer with a full size keyboard with Android Messages now. It's just more WhatsApp-style where it's paired with your phone, so you need to have your phone on and working. It also isn't integrated right into Gmail. So it's not as nice but it's got the "killer feature" of texting from your computer (which, I agree, is killer) at least.
The below is my take on Hangouts based on it's history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts
It's interesting to remember that it was born out eating multiple existing services (GChat/GoogleTalk, Huddle, and some other things probably). When it launched, it was trying to cleanup Google's fragmented text/video messaging strategy.
One funny thing is how message history search worked. There is no in-app searching history. You can search on the Gmail desktop client and see history, but no where else (no mobile app. Not in Inbox. No-where but gmail desktop).
Along the way they added SMS support for it, which they later scrapped for everyone except Project Fi/Voice customers.
Hangouts has done a lot in the last 5.5 years (since its launch). It may have tried to do too much, which may have caused some problems (especially on usability).
Hangouts Chat and Meet seem to try to start fresh and build a good product focused on business customers. How that plays out for normal gmail consumers has yet to be seen; I'm really hoping they do a good job with it.
Much better would have been to attach phone numbers to Hangouts, similar to how iMessage ties phone numbers to Apple IDs.
My problems with it were:
* It used the "phone is the source of truth" like Whatsapp, but it didn't go with always-on encryption (so they could do Google assistant in it).
* They didn't launch with a desktop web client, which it eventually got (and I really like it).
* It didn't launch with any kind of backup/restore system, though it eventually got it (so you could move to new phones).
Things I liked:
* Encrypted chats (incognito mode) worked well and had expiring messages.
* The Overall UX/UI for the mobile app and Desktop are (in my opinion) better than all the other messaging apps out there (except maybe iMessage). (Though I don't use any FB products.)
* It was on iOS and Android, and had the same features on both.
1. feature parity wasn't there. i already have whatsapp,you're asking me to move. feature parity would be minimum requirement
2. it didn't auto discover people like whatsapp does(or atleast it didn't when i tried it initially), people needed to sign up for it adding friction to an already unpleasant process of getting people to switch
3. duo wasn't in allo and allo wasn't in duo. if there had been just one app it would have had a greater value prop(at the time) of chats with video chatting. instead there was a whole 'nother app to manage. once whatsapp announced voice calls(followed by video) getting anyone to "allo/duo" was absurd
4.i remember number porting was buggy in some way, just flat out didn't work for 2 days
can't remember the rest but i remember something about the emojis bugging me(google implementation different from whatsapp) and being unable to send pdfs
it needed to compete from day one not "find it's feet" gradually. i find this to be a problem with all google products really
Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.
Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.
Allo, despite being shut down got to about the same size as Signal.
I don't want to be a Google tester (market or beta), and certainly not for years on end. I don't care about "opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on". Just build one good chat system.
In the areas where Google excels, they didn't get there by applying this throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy. The design of Google Search wasn't the result of 13 years of betas. What do you do when nothing sticks?
If they can stumble around for this long and still feel the need to test half a dozen possible strategies, maybe the correct conclusion is that, unlike Search or Maps, Google doesn't really have anything as a company to offer this product category, and they should just get out and focus on areas where they can contribute.
Build iMessage, but make it work across android, ios, and desktop web.
But the #1 thing that stops me from even considering buying an Android device is "it's not iMessage".
iMessage doesn't have single click to video, but it's also automatic. No hassle at all and I can blue bubble send perfection to any other iPhone-r. It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly.
I think that's what is really missing. People don't mind opening another app to place call / facetime / hangout video. They want simple, clear phone messaging that isn't an "app"
Disclaimer: there are no ios devices in my house and I am android guy all the way. But wow does messaging suck compared to ios world
>It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly.
But as for Hangouts being flawless messaging and not just some buggy app, I have to disagree.
Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.
Clearly that aren't doing something properly and I feel quality of the app has degraded as their efforts go elsewhere, viz. Allo, messages, etc.
Hangouts is flawless on the browser on my laptop though.
I have a Pixel 2, with Project Fi, and haven't ever really had this issue.
I don't think i got what you are saying... What do you mean automatic?
So, if setting up a phone for nana, you take it out of the box, set her up with an Apple ID, put it back in the box, send it to her, she takes it out of the box, and then you call or text her, all she has to do is answer the call. No futzing with downloading the right app, no having to make sure the person on the other end is using the same chat service; just doing it.
A friend on iOS think he has sent you a (SMS) text message.
You don't get it on your (non-apple) phone.
You don't get it on your (non-apple) work computer.
Three weeks later you log on to your iMac/mac-mini/whatever that you hardly ever use to find messages from whoever uses apple phones and has your email address on their contacts. It turns out that logging in to your desktop PC can link your AppleId (email address) to iMessage and start swallowing your text messages. You can only rectify this setting on an apple computer.
(Yes, I know I'm an edge case but I will never see iMessage as a good thing, walled gardens can suck).
Unfortunately, some of the smartest people i know now also looks down on google. This one kid that was an intern for me at MIT (whom i think was way smarter than i am) didn't even bother interviewing with google, he went to spacex.
You mention Jobs. Was he smarter than Woz or a better engineer? No, but he was a much better leader. He inspired people to work, and relentlessly drove his vision. Obviously he didn't always make the right call, but I think we can say with confidence he would not have let this messaging mess drag on for close to 10 years now.
Messaging: you have what you have now, Messages as a vanilla messaging app Allo and Duo as flavored products focusing on particular features for messaging.
Email: GMail as vanilla Inbox as a GTD-flavored that is having its most used features is being folded back into GMail.
I think there's a lack of connection between Fi and google's other chat products (or even just hangouts and fi) in terms of roadmaps and so on. Fi graduated, now hangouts going away seems a bit... reverse.
At some point in the last year, I wanted to jump into the "new chat ecosystem" and so I uninstalled hangouts to break bad habits. The entire phone becomes unable to connect to any network.
I love hangouts, and I wish RCS could just roll into it; but how did project fi end up so integrated?
No, it doesn't. In the beginning they strongly suggested that you use Hangouts for SMS on Fi, but they don't require it. I just use Messages on Fi.
The last time I used hello and duo they needed either a phone or a smartphone or both.
For me a messaging system should not require to have a phone number and should equally well across a range of devices including Linux desktop.
Hangouts and zoom can do it, why would other apps not do it?
2. What is the difference between Duo and Hangouts?
Hangouts Chat is a standalone, text chat-only app (chat.google.com), similar in functionality to Slack. It will/does have the ability for third-party developers to create bots, etc.
Hangouts Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" type of communications. Both of these (according to this blog) will only be available to G Suite (enterprise) users.
Why they are separate products? Who knows.
Yeah, no. Meet is the most equal-among-all video conferencing app I've ever seen. It's ability to promote the speaker to the main window is uncannily good. It is my go-to, and I use it intercontinental and inter-org.
Related xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/
e.g. Pidgin.
Now, everyday feels worse. Last month, I was traveling abroad and had more important things to do than to confirm the cellular number linked to voice was still mine. So google decided not just to stop redirecting phonecalls, but also to stop me from calling using the dialer app.
Basically, my "phone privileges" was unilaterally revoked by google because I did not obey the phone number verification procedure.
I have previously checked companies like callcentric, but it is now one of my priority. I can't entrust google with my phone service in 2019.
I will have to check again their offer, and see if their native client improved.
At the moment I mostly use them for fax and SIP trunking.
Even if twilio is good, I'd rather now have everything in one place.
For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.
Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.
Someone at some point in the past has created this one, for example:
https://appear.in/lolbutts
And you can join it as a guest.
Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like.
I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.
One app for consumers with video and messaging. Make it good, marry it, and shoot the others into the sun.
Now Google have dug a deeper hole as there is little change any tech influencer is going to use or promote Google messaging apps to their circle.
Personally I'm available on Signal, Skype and WhatsApp and it's going to take a hell of a change to make me care about trying something else.
What's more frustrating is that Google had Google Talk. It was super successful and really well liked. Rather than maintain and improve it, they threw it away.
one of the greatest advantages google has is gmail/hangouts native integration in the browser. if they lose that, i think a good bit of what makes gmail attractive goes with it.
i say this as an iOS user.
https://messages.android.com/
I use Signal, but it's fine at best, but it's not really going to break out of it's niche.
Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?
Google Duo has succeeded as an app known for making video calls, which is as much a marketing/positioning achievement as it is a technical one.
There are lots of people declaring they will use a Google product in this thread, but of course no one is going to use a nonexistent product that people imagine as a clone of what already exists. Unless Google finds an "in", they're not going to get anywhere, even with whatever perfect app HN imagines.
This is definitely where I'm at. I presume this is all about internal warring fiefdoms, because from the outside it makes no sense.
Desktop/mobile clients. No need for phone to login.
Oh, and server code written in Haskell :)
It's kind of like how Apple will combine security updates with stuff like new emojis: to increase the incentive for the general populus to update.
I sometimes compare Signal to iMessage, except it's cross-platform and private.
Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution.
If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now.
[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...
[1] https://9to5google.com/2018/12/05/google-allo-shutting-down/
Isn't that recursive thinking? No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.
> I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol
I'm curious, but could RCS be interchangeably used both through provider and through a host such as Google? Could Google not host their own RCS backend?
You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.
It's (sms/texting) free (http://mobile.free.fr/) and unlimited on a 2 euros monthly phone subscription with 2 hours of voice communication in France. That makes it the cheapest way to communicate at all, here. Cheaper than voice and much cheaper than internet data. Even the absolute poorest of the country can use texting. It's more accessible than DATA driven apps and can run on dumb phones.
No, noone uses it because it doesn't use data. I walk into a supermarket and lose signal so I can't SMS anymore. I can use the wifi to send messages even without signal.
Yes, I know there are SMS over Wifi apps, but they're proprietary and usually require signal to enable.
People use Whatsapp primarily, or facebook messenger, or (in my bubble anyway, not so widespread) Telegram. These products have the network effect already established, and no one is likely to go back to crappy SMS, even if it is dressed up.
I am still after a lovely opensource cross-platform simple distributed secure messaging and video platform.
I'd read that Allo was being abandoned for Messages. And I'd never heard of Duo until this post. Very confused naming and products at Google. I was trying to get my head around the differences between Play Music and Youtube Music yesterday - a case in point.
Allo
Duo
Messages
Hangouts
Hangouts Chat
Hangouts Meet
I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up?
This is ridiculous.
I just don’t know. I’m at a complete loss for words on how Google can screw this up so badly.
We actually use Hangouts every day for our business. I have been advocating a move to Slack.
In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be.
I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.
And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.
And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.
And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...
On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.
I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said.
What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)
EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
I think that iMessage network effect is a big reason for the steady market share growth of iPhone in the US- none of the competitive apps have cross-generational appeal, just iMessage.
I'm actually contemplating ICQ, it's still around and looks no worse than any other service. Matrix might be a better solution though, it's federated and open. https://matrix.org/blog/home/
ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, PawWaw, Yahoo Messenger, Odigo, (and 30 more names I can't remeber) - there was a huge instant messaging war, the first stage of which was decidedly won by AOL (with AIM and the purchase of ICQ), but Microsoft later made great headway through sheer monopoly force and persistence - but that eventually became irrelevant with SMS taking over as the main form of instant messaging and then WhatsApp taking the world by storm.
None of this was open source. Not a single one of the successful messengers. In fact, AOL fought alternative clients fiercely all the time, and Microsoft started fighting them as soon as they got non-trivial market share.
What about XMPP (Which started life as Jabber before being standardized?)? Well, that one is open source. But it only survived and flourished because all the commercial outfits were busy fighting each other.
I was tangentially involved with the failed instant messaging standardization process at the turn of the millennium, and Jabber was by far the worst technical proposal at the time -- but the process was political, and when the committee disbanded due to all the political infighting, Jabber, which didn't have the commercial interests, was the remaining option.
As you can tell by the length of my last post, thinking about this situation has got me upset.
So upset, that right now I've decided to launch a non-profit, open collective organization called OOMA. Only One Messaging App.
OOMA will be comprised of the millions of people who are annoyed and upset at the result of tech companies competing for our communication. We are taking things into our own hands. We are agreeing to switch to ONE service, for ALL of our messaging needs. All of us, all over the world, all at once.
We are going to do 5 things, in order: 1. Choose a switch date. 2. Define a spec for the "perfect messaging app" (encryption, licensing, finance model, features, tech, etc.) 3. Invite companies to pitch their app, and/or secure funding to develop our own to spec. 4. Spread the word. 5. Make the switch.
I'm going to prepare a marketing web page and (ironically) a discord server right now. At the very worst it's a fun side project and way to express my anger.
EDIT: OOMA server is live. If you think an app is not the solution, come tell us why: https://discord.gg/CmdgUp
For real though, has any sort of movement or organization tried to alleviate these problems without financial motivation?
What's the old phrase? If it looks stupid but it works, its not stupid. Say hello to the world's most valuable public company and what is commonly regarded as the world's highest quality messaging network.
A truth technologists hate hearing: You cannot, under any circumstances, solve problems created by code by creating more code.
It’s almost like the iPhone is a fetish or totem that grants access to iMessage (although you can message from macos or iCloud.com impractically).
It’s quite strange how this is a very simple, solved, problem for iPhone for many years. Google can fix it by literally cloning iMessage and arguing with carriers. They don’t. I suspect it’s because they want to be the only one with access to the cleartext and they aren’t willing to make a consumer-focused decision to keep all messages ciphertext.
So “most of the planet” has to suffer Google’s anti-consumer decision.
It’s like buying a diesel vehicle and then complaining that the hybrid systems suck for them. Don’t buy a diesel if you want hybrid engines. Or work with the manufacturer to change their incentive model.
But google is an ad company and is unlikely to make products where it is hard to sell ads.
Doesn’t work with some sms gateways that don’t y’all GV, but the best international I know.
Each country gets a new sim with a local number for data and local texts but I never give it out.
However, installing the Hangouts client will let you use it as a better GV app for every day use (messages/voice, for settings and stuff you still need the GV app or the GV website).
At least until Hangout dies ...
I think GV is limited to US numbers and you have to have a US number to sign up.
It places a burden on my contacts who want to send an sms because they have to use international rates. But it’s better than not being able to text me.
1) Port your US number to Google Voice for a one time fee of $25 ; from now on, you can use this number to forward to your new verizon number (also: T-Mobile had much better plans for only a few months at a time, every single time I checked).
2) Get service in Europe from an Illiad affiliated phone company; At least in the past, that included free US numbers you could forward your US google voice to freely -- as well as 15-45 days of free US roaming service. Maybe these offers are gone now - you could just pay $1/month or so to LocalPhone or a similar company to do that forwarding for you.
3) Buy the cheapest Android handset running a recent version (for security updates); I got a new Meizu m6 for ~$90, you could probably go lower for 1st hand or get a 2nd hand at $40 or so.
4) When travelling, switch SIMs between main phone and cheap phone, set up forwarding (directly if included in plan, or through LocalPhone or similar if not), and keep cheap phone on WiFi only, plugged in charging at home, and mostly accessible for when needed.
5) Use WhatsApp web on the new phone to continue using old WhatsApp number. Less than ideal - messages don't pop up - but it works well.
For about $100 one time[0], and about $1/month or so, you could to keep both numbers fully functional and working indefinitely.
[0] Ok, so you'll have to upgrade the cheap phone for security reasons every few years. So not exactly one time, but possible $20/year amortized, or free if you don't trade-in your old main phone and just let it rot like many people do.
The only way forward is either Matrix or something like it. And even then you need enough momentum to bend all the walled gardens of Google / MS / FB / etc to have to play ball with a common federated protocol. Good luck getting that without the ludicrous budgets the market leaders have to throw at trying to force everyone into their own proprietary chat bubble.
We almost had that in the mid 2000s and the Google jumped ship first to Hangouts. They basically started this whole mess by going from a time where MSN Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk were all speaking the same XMPP language. Since then all three have gone total proprietary with design decisions around locking people in than providing a useful product.
Some things are fine to have proprietary giants trying to fight for your eyeballs over, such as entertainment. But communication should be something we can agree on, as a society. This is the kind of thing we should have international interoperable standards on. Email was a lucky break that SMTP and IMAP ended up being mandatory, because even today Google is trying their damn hardest to implement Gmail in anything other but an interoperable way but know it would destroy their product to ever turn the compatibility off.
1. A centralized and proprietary system, but with a transparent and non-profit governance structure. I understand the costs and technical challenges of global communication are bigger than say, wikipedia... but is it impossible?
2. The power of collective action. Communications apps don't put users first because we have no bargaining power. What would they do for us if we threatened to leave, en-mass (or vice versa, if enough people offered to collectively adopt their solution?).
And honestly, the problem might be better approached as a personal, social one: I don't care what the world uses, how do I get my social and professional circle to adopt one single solution?
This is more what I have in mind with "Only One Messaging App". We've grown 800% in the last quarter, so keep an eye out for us :P