Google's messaging mess continues: Chat app now wants to be the next WhatsApp

Yeah getting dependent on any Google service is just a waiting game to handle catastrophe. That said I've yet to find a single semi-competent calendar widget in Android (month view most importantly) which keeps me. But as the legacy workspaces fiasco showed it's only a matter of time until I'm forced to take action.

Wait, what happened with domains?

I've always suspected that the reason Google keeps abandoning products is because they're actually in it for the data. They're not out to make a good RSS feed reader or a good music service, they're interested in how people use feed readers or how people use music. Once they sucked all the data they wanted out of it they trash it.

There's also data sources which they've never abandoned, like watching people's location (baked into Android and Maps), or email, or photos, or files (Drive), and of course web search. Probably because the nature of this kind of data remains always relevant.

This is all very interesting for chat because they've been revisiting this product category so many times, trashing and re-doing chat clients in endless variations, as opposed to sticking to one or two (one for enterprise and one for regular people, for example). Not sure what that says about chat as a data source. Either it's a particularly challenging category, or it keeps evolving so Google keep discovering new angles that are worth mining.

There never was before. Alphabet's internal HR metrics heavily weigh creating new products to maintaining new ones. There are a lot of times where the engineers that developed products are no longer on the dev team during launch.

Supposedly the Android team is pretty fiercely firewalled from the rest of Google which is why it's the only time with products that have any kind of longevity.

I'm pretty much all in on Google's ecosystem as it stands, but I'm increasingly wary about using any of their new services as and when they show up—for example, I liked the idea of Stadia and was impressed with its performance, but the fact the games you bought could disappear with the service gave me enough pause to not go all in on it.

Lo and behold, that failed within a couple of years. Though slightly to their credit, they did refund everyone that bought games on the service.

From what I have read its simply not how Google works on the inside. They have all the best programmers developing new "products" which then get tested live. If a product wins great, put the best on something else. Maintaining existing products outside of the core search and ad's is seen internally as a menial job, and managers focus on keeping maintenance costs low and quiet new ideas.

But yes, Hangouts was amazing at its peak. I could group chat, video chat, send MMS like posts, connect it directly to my google voice and more. They should have kept working on it.

'Allo there, Duo.

Ideally google should push for a regulatory investigation into Meta for their market share of Messenger + WhatsApp.

Every year we see either messenger or WhatsApp at the top of communication tools in all countries apart from east and south east Asia.

whatsapp's killer feature was "no killer features, just a messaging app with number-bound IDs and good UI that even my grandma can use with minimal setup". for anything like that again I'd change, but the minute they think they need to add something like numberless IDs, or stickers, or a social media feature, or a payment system, they can fuck right off.

It's not a killer feature that they need, they need user base. There's no reason for people to leave WhatsApp, as long as people can use it.

Here in Brazil, the only surges in Telegram popularity and actual usage where when WhatsApp was blocked countrywide, and even then we had several people downloading the shadiest VPNs out there just to log in on WhatsApp

Google's tried a few times. Allo, hangouts, and probably others.

It feels like matrix is the answer to a something I considered a lot a few years back which is that it shouldn't be on me, the sender, to know what messaging app the receiver would like to use. I should be able to send to some sort of message clearing house and then the receiver can elect the way they want to retrieve from that.

Is that about right?

I've only used RCS a few times a my MIL has patchy data in her flat. The problem I have with it is that it's baked into the same app as SMS, so you're not really sure if you're going to be sending an SMS or RCS message until you go into the chat and it says whether it's available. And I don't trust that it's always going to work as RCS - I certainly don't want it falling back to SMS if it fails.

With WhatsApp or Telegram, you know exactly what's happening.