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.
Stadia really needed to be a monthly subscription model rather than asking people to buy games on Stadia.
Nobody wanted to buy in to a Google platform, but I might’ve signed up for a month and had a look.
probably about a week, give or take
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.
I feel the same way used to love hangouts, tried allo. But at this point I don’t even use rcs because although it’s “open” no third party developers can make apps for it. Using matrix with bridges via beeper is how I integrate all my chats now and makes life way easier
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.
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Seriously. I’m quite a Google maximalist (yea, I know, spare me) and a
young-ishnot-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.Even Google Chat is trash. It can’t beat Signal.
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Zuckerberg can be an moron from a privacy perspective, but he sure does seem to respect stability.
Killing hangouts just made me use other platforms and throw Google in the bin.
When they keep killing stuff I use, I get burnt.
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Me, an Inbox by Gmail fan: first time?
Inbox dying was when I started to pull back from Google. What a great product and they just trashed it.
I still haven’t found anything as good as inbox. I used Outlook for a few years, and spark for a couple more, but I just went back to Gmail a couple months ago
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!
Got my immediate family on it. Miss some features when forced elsewhere.
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
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.
I used GTalk with the family.
Then you killed it.
(GTalk not the family)
…nope, can’t use it to chat with my friends and family, we all gave up on Teh Goog and I worked there for over a decade! 😆
(also, by the time you see this, they may have renamed it or introduced a competing messaging app. or both.)
And the new one they introduced will have fewer features than the old one with no plans to get it to feature parity.
Matrix
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???
“We promise we wont kill this one!”
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.
No thanks goolag
I gave up once Wave was killed. It was the best of them.
Wave was so cool. haha
The article says
Just to recap: Google Talk (gchat) > Google Hangouts > Hangouts Chat > Google Chat
but of course that’s only part of the story. Here’s a longer recap from 2021.
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.
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.
