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
How long until they close down the Google Chat app and move to something else that is barely different?
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
Using Google apps used to be a smooth and seamless experience but it’s become a slog. The best you can hope for is that they’ll just stop supporting whatever service you like and just let it rot without updates for years while you are allowed to keep using it. Otherwise they’ll just force you to migrate around constantly while merging or fragmenting the experience until the former happens anyway.
It’s exhausting and it’s utterly destroyed my desire to check out anything new in their ecosystem.
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.
Absolutely. What I’m looking for is actually an Alternative to Skype on the Desktop, that is simple enough to use for my mother. Discord is too overloaded for her. Hangouts would have worked. Maybe Google Chat could fill the gap, I don’t even know what it can and can’t, despite relying Google products heavily. I literally gave up trying to follow their chat efforts years ago.
It’s really hard to fathom how Google’s decision makers don’t understand that in addition to being confusing, their failure to settle on one messaging app makes them look stupid and flaky in the eyes of average users. This isn’t some niche app for specialists that Google can get away with killing because the user base is relatively small. The general public uses instant messaging all day every day, and after having Google pull the football away two or three times, they’re just going to decide to use something that’s going to stick around instead.
Killing hangouts just made me use other platforms and throw Google in the bin.
When they keep killing stuff I use, I get burnt.
Inbox dying was when I started to pull back from Google. What a great product and they just trashed it.
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)
Please use Signal. It is a great alternative!
Surprisingly it’s been really easy to get people on signal, haven’t had to really try convincing people at all just explain what it is and they get it
still can’t get my friends and family on it, have to use messenger which is quite the pain lol
Huh? They confused 1st of July with 1st of April?
Another chat app???
They don’t get tired announcing and killing all of those chat apps???
Who’s going to bother inviting friends to chat in a platform that will be killed in one year max???
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?
