Technology

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

Please use Signal. It is a great alternative!

Killing hangouts just made me use other platforms and throw Google in the bin.

When they keep killing stuff I use, I get burnt.

I used GTalk with the family.

Then you killed 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.

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!"

…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.)

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.

Matrix

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.

It's impossible to keep up with Google's various services. Unless it's Gmail or Photos, it'll probably get killed within a year.

I remember I actually used Allo, and Hangouts

Seriously google WTF

Why is it written with collectivist speak? "..reminds us..? Who is the "us"? The collectivist phrasing is disturbing as opposed to using objective terms.

I gave up once Wave was killed. It was the best of them.

I wrote about this last year because google keeps wanting to blame others for its own messaging failures.

No thanks goolag

I always used to use Hangouts as my default chat app for friends. We had a big DnD group chat on it. But we migrated to WhatsApp when Google said they were going to kill hangouts and never looked back.

Why would I trust Google with my chats when they constantly abandon/kill off their best tools. We've now moved to Signal and I'm expecting to stay there for a long time.

Maybe these will be more effective than those ads trying to convince Apple to use RCS, but it just seems sad at this point. Is there meant to be a strategy here?

I honestly had no idea that this existed. Messages is also useless until Google and Apple get their s*** together and figure out a cross plattform standard to communicate. Until then, I use third party apps.

Thats gonna be a no from me... I utilized Hangouts heavily for chat and SMS, then they killed it for no fucking reason. Never again putting trust in a google app, because they sunset at random times without any good reason.