This is exactly why so many of my friends and family use Hangouts née Gmail Chat.
We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever.
Then the conversations follow when you log off whatever desktop or laptop you're on via the mobile app. About half of us use Android so it either comes standard or you can easily install. The other half uses iOS and unlike iMessage/iChat/Facetime, you can easily use it on iOS as well as Android.
I installed Allo today but so far I haven't had a chance to try it out. Frankly it gives me the same mild annoyance I felt when Facebook broke messaging out into a separate app (and when I just said screw it and uninstalled both).
As much as I use and generally like Google stuff, they drive me nuts with their approach a lot of the time. When GChat/Talk became Hangouts and started integrating Voice and SMS/MMS, it seemed like a move in the right direction, both for them as a company (wanting to be your one stop shop for messaging) and for me as a user (less apps, more seamless integration). Then SMS/MMS was split back off into Messaging, Voice...I haven't really heard much about Voice in a while which is weird because it was one of those things that seemed so promising at one point. And now Duo alongside the pretty great video chat already in Hangouts and Allo alongside Messaging alongside Hangouts.
I get the idea of maybe starting a secondary platform/service/app to see what sticks and what doesn't. At worst they can integrate the good bits into their main product (see: Inbox). But their messaging strategy seems more like publishing Inbox with the intention of just ditching plain old Gmail.
oh I thought this was some new Hangouts interface, but it's not is it?
So...Google Buzz.
If they want something really innovative, bring back open standards and a federated IM protocol. We went from AIM/Yahoo/MSN to XMPP .. and back to Google/FB. It feels like a regression.
XMPP was just to crack the egg. They had to dangle a big enough carrot to get users to switch. They knew once they had them switched that it would be VERY unlikely users would go back. So... lockdown! And they were right, how many people have switched back to AOL/MSN/Yahoo? I know I haven't.
I use messenger.com more often than I use Facebook at this point. I know it's not technically a desktop app but you could probably set up a shortcut with something like (assuming chrome. Don't know if FF has the same feature)
Exactly. Hangouts has a lot of problems - its performance doesn't impress me, and the UI is confusing in a lot of ways, and splitting SMS/Conversations is something that really disappointed me, but still - it has the full featureset. I mean obviously, it suffers from the fact that it's heavily tied to Google accounts, which isn't ideal for trying to reach outside of the Google sphere. But otherwise, it does everything.
UI? I write things, and they appear in front of someone else. Even my technophobe mom has no problems with it.
Tied to Google... well, yeah. But you kind of need some kind of 'account' for chat apps.
I remember when 'Whatsapp' came out and people mentioned that it didn't have a web interface. I won't use anything that I can't type into when I'm at a computer - pulling out my phone and t-y-p-i-n-g out a message is just a non-starter.
The UI lags hard for me during common operations, such as opening the app, and sending messages; often there's a several second lag between pressing the send button, the entry field blanking, and the message finally showing up in the conversation w/ UI indicating that it's in the process of being sent.
And occasionally, yes, I out-type the app & phone's ability to process keyboard input. My phone is a bit old, but that seems like an excuse more than anything; I don't really understand why it's so hard for a device w/ a processor that measures its speed in GHz and RAM measured in GB to keep up with a single app whose job is to send text messages.
But alas, the phone world's opinion is that I should upgrade to the latest and greatest $400-$600 phone every 18 months.
Hangouts crashes all the time on my Nexus 6P. Video calls are buggy and any interaction with photos is extremely sluggish. This has been going on for months and months.
And the name is stupid. When I used to encourage people to use Hangouts, I always had to explain the name. Talk is a great name and they should have gone back to it for Allo.
I think it helps to define what we are talking about. "Hangouts" can be the system overall, the web interface (and which one, Inbox, Gmail or video chat?), or the mobile phone app, of which it may behavior differently on the different phone OSs. Hangouts is usually very timely and responsive for me when using Inbox or Gmail. The Android app is slow and annoying. I've never used the iOS app.
Oof yes, I have noticed that one a couple of times. And it would be nice to be able to send messages and video chat between individual devices that I own (all my kids' tablets are on my account), but I suppose that's out-of-scope.
> They had an established userbase, a name, a brand
While I agree with first two, Hangouts was a terrible brand with a bad rep on UX (too slow on Android, complex UI etc), it was kind of like Google's Internet Explorer. They had to get rid of the brand for consumers at least especially younger ones that are the prime target (the Snapchat generation if I may say). I agree though that Hangouts has a better reputation with the corporate world even though Slack is kind of eating their lunch minus the video part where they're still king I think.
They had talk, voice, buzz, hangouts ... have a messenger app ... now 2 more ... all of them incomplete, slow, confusing, ugly ... it's amazing how, with the immense budget they have and with so many smart people , they cannot come up with something decent
These 2 new apps are destined to fail
I still use hangouts cause it's linked with Gmail ... but I hate it cause it's slow and unreliable
One possible explanation: internally Google eats their own dog food. When I was a contractor there, everything ran on gmail, gooogle docs, and hangouts. Perhaps they wanted something better for internal use, and now we get to use it also?
Unfortunately it's a trend for Google to lose features in replacements and event new versions sometimes. I use Inbox for my personal gmail account, because I like how it lets me manage my personal mail. Unfortunately, there's still some integrations with calendars and stuff that doesn't work in Inbox but works in Gmail. And you can't search hangouts in Inbox (even though hangouts is integrated into it). Want to search hangouts message history? Open a tab and sign into gmail, and use that. Seriously, why do I have to lose so much of the functionality I grew accustomed to in the past when the app is from the same company? So frustrating.
I use Google Voice for a second phone number on my iPhone and yeah, it worries me how little attention it seems to get.
It took Google forever to update it to match the iOS 7 "flat" look. And to this day it's missing a pretty obvious feature: search! Yes, there is no search functionality in the Google Voice app on iPhone. Apple's Messages and Facebook Messenger both have it.
There is no search functionality in the hangouts app either. What other messaging apps lack the ability to search conversations? Google's own SMS messenger app implements search beautifully.
Yet apparently not business accounts. You can use the integrated hangouts in gmail, and the phone apps, but hangouts.google.com says it's not an enabled app for your account, and I can't seem to find where it's available to enable/add in the admin console (that is, I can find where to enable and add apps, but it isn't listed, and I'm a super admin). The Apps marketplace has third party apps, but that's not what I'm looking for.
I'm able to use hangouts.google.com in both my personal Google Apps domain and my work's Google Apps domain. Almost certainly a setting buried somewhere deep in the Admin Console. :(
Thanks for the heads up. Not that I know it's at least possible, I'll spend some time and did a little deeper. I'm interested in seeing how it compares to Slack (basically, how well it uses the defined groups and membership in them that are already configured).
I don't want Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook app cannot be uninstalled on my device since it came preinstalled with the Android OS on it (HTC One - it can however be disabled).
Now, if someone uses Facebook Messenger to send me a message, my Facebook app will notify me about unread messages - I've disabled most notifications, but the icon still gets a number increase indicating messages that can be read. These messages cannot be read from within the app without installing Messenger. Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app.
The only sad part here are the few "friends" that actually write their messages to /dev/null trying to reach me...
I've been contemplating disabling my FB account altogether, but it turns out it is required sometimes for authentication. Spotify being an important one for me.
> Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app.
Ditto. Works for me, too. I use FB.com to see messages on mobile Safari.
The only reason I don't use FB.com for everything is cause FB app allows me to upload video (but since I can't seem to get video posted to FB, via my iPhone 5C, to come out nicely, I'm going to delete the app too).
On Chrome on Android, at least, if you don't use "Request desktop site", you can't get messages on messenger.com or facebook.com (the messages icon doesn't even show up on the latter, and the former just directs you to an app download.)
You can use "request desktop site" on messenger.com (and probably also facebook.com), or use mbasic.facebook.com to get messages without the messenger app.
If you force the desktop version of the page it works, but is awkward. Instead I use a web wrapper that has some other nice features, like showing me my messages with formatting that scales well to my phone's screen size
Part of the problem is that they want to change the backends too. Hangouts had a lot of problems. Allo is their way of trying to create a clean slate and break away from the legacy of Hangouts. They can still keep Hangouts for some things, but they want to focus on a product that will get picked up by your average mobile user. People these days like using phone numbers for identification and a lot of users don't ever use a desktop. They're building for that user first. We'll see if it ever becomes a chat product the rest of us want to use.
For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me.
My wife also had three account entities for the same name in the Google system and sometimes her reply would get sent to a new chat. So about once a week my history with her would start fresh.
However, I agree that hangouts has been my preferred chat application for a long time and I'm disappointed how hard it is to get into the siloed worlds that a lot of chat apps have these days.
> For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me.
I had something similar to this happen a year or two ago. Messaged not showing up, or silently showing up later, and generally from one or two people of those I used hangouts with. In my case it was either a separate app that still thought it was the default SMS application (so Messages was default for SMS, but Hangouts was still set up to be integrated with SMS, or possibly it went weird if Messages was running even if Hangouts was the default SMS app), and once I disabled the old app, I got much more consistent behavior.
Hangouts itself was supposed to be the "look at all the stuff we can do if we abandon XMPP" rewrite. And it's only three years old. How can they need to do it again?
"This is exactly why so many of my friends and family use Hangouts née Gmail Chat. We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever."
That's exactly why I don't use browser-only IM clients. I don't want to keep open a full-fledged browser only to stay online when something much less would be sufficient. Ideally, a IM should offer a broad list of solutions: web-based, desktop native clients, mobile apps, and whatever else one might think about. One size fits all is only a sure way to self limit the adoption of your IM solution.
I dont see how breaking out the messaging part was bad, the messenger app is far superior to the normal one and the chatheads is great. has the same benefit as hangouts, (multiplatform)
Just speaking for myself but I liked being able to just open Facebook when I want to look at Facebook. That goes for PMs people send me on Facebook.
I didn't want a second app running at all times in the background when my goal was to minimize Facebook usage when possible.
Now I have to jump through hoops to check messages every once in a while on my phone because they make it so they won't show up on mobile unless you install their secondary app or switch to a desktop user agent.
So now I just check messages once or twice a week on desktop and use their service even less often.
We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever.
Then the conversations follow when you log off whatever desktop or laptop you're on via the mobile app. About half of us use Android so it either comes standard or you can easily install. The other half uses iOS and unlike iMessage/iChat/Facetime, you can easily use it on iOS as well as Android.
I installed Allo today but so far I haven't had a chance to try it out. Frankly it gives me the same mild annoyance I felt when Facebook broke messaging out into a separate app (and when I just said screw it and uninstalled both).
As much as I use and generally like Google stuff, they drive me nuts with their approach a lot of the time. When GChat/Talk became Hangouts and started integrating Voice and SMS/MMS, it seemed like a move in the right direction, both for them as a company (wanting to be your one stop shop for messaging) and for me as a user (less apps, more seamless integration). Then SMS/MMS was split back off into Messaging, Voice...I haven't really heard much about Voice in a while which is weird because it was one of those things that seemed so promising at one point. And now Duo alongside the pretty great video chat already in Hangouts and Allo alongside Messaging alongside Hangouts.
I get the idea of maybe starting a secondary platform/service/app to see what sticks and what doesn't. At worst they can integrate the good bits into their main product (see: Inbox). But their messaging strategy seems more like publishing Inbox with the intention of just ditching plain old Gmail.