Google Abandons Their Google Hangouts API (techcrunch.com) 150
"Once again we're seeing the hazards of developing using a third party service API," writes Slashdot reader BarbaraHudson, reporting that Google "will be discontinuing support for the Google Hangouts API going forward... Google Hangouts is now so insignificant that the cancellation didn't even rate an official blog post. As reported by TechCrunch, "just an updated FAQ and email notification to developers active on the API, forwarded to us by one of these devs."
TechCrunch writes:
As Google pushes Duo as its consumer video chat app and relegates Hangouts to the enterprise, it's dropping the flexibility to build these kinds of experiences. The email explains... "We understand this will impact developers who have invested in our platform. We have carefully considered this change and believe that it allows us to give our users a more targeted Hangouts desktop video experience going forward."
TechCrunch calls the move "a casualty of Google's fragmented messaging app strategy and the neglect of Hangouts itself." While some apps will continue working -- for example, integration with Slack -- their API's FAQ now ends with a reminder that "Users of apps will see a notice in the call letting them know that the app they're using will no longer work after April 25th."
TechCrunch calls the move "a casualty of Google's fragmented messaging app strategy and the neglect of Hangouts itself." While some apps will continue working -- for example, integration with Slack -- their API's FAQ now ends with a reminder that "Users of apps will see a notice in the call letting them know that the app they're using will no longer work after April 25th."
Good Riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Hangouts should've been renamed to Hangups. Connection issues were so rampant, and was one of the primary reasons Google Helpouts failed so badly.
Re: Good Riddance (Score:1)
Maybe it should be called Giveup instead.
That's what Google do to every other service except search.
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Project RICKROLL (Never Gonna Give You Up, Never Gonna Let You Down)
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Google uses Hangouts for their own internal communication, to the point of avoiding using actual phone calls or email which makes them a pain in the ass to deal with if you're not a googler. Maybe they're deprecating the API but not the product itself?
Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Hangouts should've been renamed to Hangups. Connection issues were so rampant, and was one of the primary reasons Google Helpouts failed so badly.
I disagree. I used hangouts to call my wife and kids frequently from Afghanistan over a 2Mbps satellite connection and never experienced a hangup. in fact, the voice and video quality was FAR superior to any other voice/video offering on the market. It worked for me in 2007-8 and 2011-12 without a hitch. I have also leveraged it for years in my asterisk pbx without issues on hours long conference calls. that being said, hangouts itself is not being retired (thankfully), the API is.
"hazards of developing using a third party" (Score:5, Insightful)
These are the hazards of relying on Google for anything. They throw stuff away constantly.
Re:"hazards of developing using a third party" (Score:5, Informative)
No for the most part they throw away unpopular things off little interest. Chances are if you're using this API you can manage the complaints you get from both of your customers.
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The negative attitude directed at tossing out something approximately nobody used is predictable, since it's super-bitch Barbara Hudson. Her Facebook is basically "EVERYONE IS ASSHOLES LOOK HOW FUCKING ASSHOLES EVERYONE IS" and "I FOUND PUPPIES I'M SO GOOD SOME ASSHOLES DIDN'T RESCUE THESE PUPPIES BEFORE ME SO I HAVE TO RESCUE THEM BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES AND I'M AN ANGEL!!!!!!!111" Her M.O. is essentially "you're wrong and an asshole," no matter who you are.
Not many people can claim to be th
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I think Google is missing the point here
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Google sometimes lacks perspective on what constitutes "unpopular"
Perspective is something for people who are making assumptions. Google doesn't need perspective, they have analytics.
there is a pretty wide margin between genuinely unpopular
The No True Scotsman fallacy is worse when you're actually Scottish as you have even more of a preconceived bias. Take a survey of Slashdot and you're likely to get widely different results compared to taking a survey somewhere else. Analytics is what breaks through those biases. e.g. Based on what goes on here Facebook is incredibly unpopular, no one uses it and it has zero influence on the
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Analytics have to be interpreted... through a lens of perspective. I was looking at a cpu usage graph today... someone pointed out a huge spike and asked for an explanation... the graph scaled automatically so the massive spike was only a 5% usage increase on a system that was mostly idle and created the illusion of a massive spike because a measly 5% was massive relative to the variance ov
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Analytics have to be interpreted... through a lens of perspective.
If only we knew of a company that was good at dealing with large amounts of data and searching through it, an expert who specialises in bringing together large data sets and extracting meaningful data from them.
I'm going to quote myself for prosperity:
I'll side with what Google views as "genuinely" popular / unpopular.
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It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:5, Insightful)
These days it's hard to write anything non-trivial without relying on something that will be hard to replace if it goes away, that's just a reality of modern software design. You can minimize the risk with abstraction and try to rely on open standards with multiple implementations, but at some point you have to just accept the occasional puzzle piece change as part of the business and move on.
That said, google pulls this shit all the time. Using a google API or service for anything critical would imo be a huge risk given their long history of suddenly killing things.
Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:5, Insightful)
While I don't expect Google to realistically support every failed project forever, every product or service they kill reinforces the notion that "the cloud" simply means "services you rent which can be arbitrarily shut down at any time by the company who actually owns them."
There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides. And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.
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There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides.
Agree entirely. It's a risk and business management decision as much as a technical one. Relying on 3rd party services is obviously (or hopefully obviously) a risk, but risk is a basic component of most business.
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Re: It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:4, Insightful)
The cloud is the deathknell of everything a personal computer used to stand for. We used to have our own files and programs, we were the masters. Now we're merely the tenants, paying rent every so often, our devices and apps beleaguered by ads and other bullshit.
RMS had it correct, but idk if he predicted our trojan horses wouldn't exactly come from the Microsofts of the world initially... but from hardware makers concocting a new type of computer (smartphone) which in turn inflicted the rest of the market with this shit mentality.
Re: It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:5, Insightful)
Turns out most people out there DO NOT WANT a "personal computer" in the way you and I understand it. They consider it too much trouble and effort.
Bait and switch (Score:3)
Marketing: "Computers" are scary, let's call this computer a "telephone" (a device that only handles voice) and deceive folks into trusting our treacherous spy machines and paying us handsomely each month for the privilege.
Moron Consumers: "Ooh, shiny!"
Re: It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:1)
That's exactly what Hitler said when he build the concentration camps (except for the "personal computer" part).
Adolf, is that you?
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It's called progress. Embrace it. "Personal computers" are dead.
We should start calling them "workstations" again, as I think that much better reflects their actual purpose these days. The new "personal computer" is a smartphone.
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And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.
I don't see many people developing, deploying and maintaining a video chat service for less than the occasional hassle of changing providers who use a sane API. Integration should be incredibly simple and inexpensive. You could have many dozen Google Hangout type services shutter and still save time and money over developing it and hosting it in-house.
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Or if you are actually the customer. (lik google docs, office 356 etc.)
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...and in fairness to them, they launched the API in 2011 (https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/google-launches-hangouts-api-for-developers/) - so they've given it about 6 years. There aren't many assets you can rely on for 6 years without having to do some sort of rewrite/patchup or whatever.
I think the real issue here is for people who've only just decided to integrate with it. They've just spent however much time/money engineering it in, and now they've only got until April (a proper bummer if you just impl
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If you're going cloud right you, you go with Amazon, and only Microsoft if you're all .NET
Real developers are going cloud with Mirai. Your code deploys to 100,000+ geodiverse nodes, and their cloud is only guaranteed to get bigger!
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That's not really true for software and services companies pay serious money for, such as Oracle (for database), Microsoft (for Office) or Atlassian (for web collaboration software).
One of the problems with open source and Web 2.0 is that providers take the attitude, hey, you got it for free. You should thank us for the use you were able to get out of it. And anyway, check out our new stuff... you might like it even better.
And that's why the aforesaid vendors of proprietary software continue to do well.
Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been involved in refactoring lots of software to replace dependencies on dead or obsolete tools and libraries, some of which were very expensive. Open source projects stagnate and die, but businesses go bankrupt, shift directions and discontinue products if they become unprofitable.
Determining the stability of a product and the impact to your business if it goes away is (or should be) part of the business decision process.
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I've been involved in refactoring lots of software to replace dependencies on dead or obsolete tools and libraries, some of which were very expensive. Open source projects stagnate and die, but businesses go bankrupt, shift directions and discontinue products if they become unprofitable.
Determining the stability of a product and the impact to your business if it goes away is (or should be) part of the business decision process.
Completely agreed.
However there is a difference between using a open source project and using a third party API.
If the open source project is abandoned, you have the option of sponsoring it or picking it up and continuing it for yourself if you feel it's that useful. But even if not, the worst case scenario generally still leaves you with working code, so you can manage the transition to a new product at whatever pace you need to.
If you're relying on an API that gets abandoned, you are generally given a fix
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If you're willing to pay big money for something, then you should be able to afford to continue maintaining an open source stack even if the original author has lost interest...
Just because something is expensive doesn't mean the vendor will keep maintaining it.. Many big vendors have dropped products over the years, or moved their customers to new versions with various disadvantages etc. If the code runs on your own hardware then you can keep running old versions, but it will become increasingly problemati
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These days it's hard to write anything non-trivial without relying on something that will be hard to replace if it goes away, that's just a reality of modern software design.
Umm, no, it isn't.
Learn how to write a web page without using api from other sources. Don't use javascipt links.
WRITE YOUR OWN CODE!
It's pure lazy to use 3rd party links. If you can't code without the crutches, then at least admit you're handicapped.
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Assuming in the realm of "non-trivial", and presuming e-commerce you're probably going to be using some kind of payment processor and possibly payment service provider, not to mention some kind of database.
Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google (Score:4, Interesting)
And you use an OSS database to avoid Oracle^H^H^H^H^H being shafted/crushed/hung-drawn-and-quartered. If they get borked, at least they can always be forked - and others will be in the same boat.
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Databases are piss-easy these days. Any competent programmer can code up a custom web site with DB support, forms, basic customer-service tools, as well as helpful information for the visitors, in about 5 days (max). That's with no 3rd party libraries.
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write a web page
I said non-trivial. Most web pages are pretty trivial.
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The rest is more difficult, that is persuading non-technical or less-technical folks that open API is not open source. Especially when
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Most of the stuff Google kill are at the point of obscurity anyway. If you were building you business on such an API you've failed already even if it doesn't get killed.
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Well, it really depends on *what* you are doing.
The reality is that pulling in dependencies has gotten perhaps *too* easy to the point of depending on external service or software in such a way that the rug could be yanked out from under you in a way that could have been easily avoided.
It's not really *that* new, but people are quick to look for depedencies that really aren't needed. They hear some protocol or some RFC and immediately jump to searching for a library, when if they read the protocol or RFC t
Really? (Score:2)
I used to love hangouts. We used 'em at work (instead of whatever MS was pushing or webex or whatever that other 3rd party remote chat program was).
Work eventually got zoom, which works pretty well, and we finally bailed on hangouts. But it always seemed like a solid cross platform solution to me...
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Google shithole (Score:5, Interesting)
As a former Google employee, I can only laugh at this.
Throw one more on the pile. There's literally thousands more where it came from.
That company is absolutely infested with self-important assholes who all think they're the next big SV hot shit. Nobody wants to maintain anything and no documentation is kept up, because the brilliant geniuses hired out of college to make it all moved up or out three months later after shitting their half-assed garbage out in a flurry of sick buzzwords so impressive that nobody wanted to admit they didn't know what the fuck was being said.
Re:Google shithole (Score:5, Interesting)
So true. We've tried to work with google on 2 separate projects. Each time every engineer that has had to work with them has said how full of themselves every single one of them has been. There is no compromise, and god forbid you ever bring up an issue or something could be an issue in the future. Everything from them is the way something should be done, and you are doing it wrong and must conform. Even though they will be scrapping what you just tried to interface with because it was so horribly designed and unmaintainable by some 'rockstar' google coder that the project couldn't continue and will just be scrapped for another haphazard api later
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After working with many of their APIs, I have to agree. I call them an 80% company. The people there get excited about doing something, do the 80% easy part, then bail out on handling the edge cases and making it robust and actually a functioning product. So on the surface, what you are looking sounds like just what you want, and even getting the happy path might be fine, but it isn't too far down the road before you find functions missing definitions, or even giant use cases completely neglected.
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Well, it's not just google. That attitude is infecting a lot of the industry. Business leaders have figured out that short term prospects can be very good based on the '80%', and by the time the jig is up, they've moved on to another fly by night project exploiting that short term benefit.
This is not the first time, the dot com bubble was also built largely on this sort of behavior. Companies that prioritize ability to provide long term support take a backseat to the new blood that has nothing to lose an
Little did you all know (Score:2)
Google lets engineers devote 20% of time to side projects.... but makes sure it allocates no more than 10% of time to its own.
Once again (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again Google fucks people over, people who've spent a lot of time and energy building shit to work with their system.
The motto of this story is, "Work with Google and you'll get abandoned whenever they feel like it."
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Considering how "insignificant" Hangouts has become, it appears that most developers already abandoned the service.
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Considering how "insignificant" Hangouts has become, it appears that most developers already abandoned the service.
If you think this is just about Hangouts, you haven't been paying attention.
Re:Once again (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe Google is closing something that is used so little that most developers who have put time and effort into it have written it off as a failure long ago.
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Or maybe Google is closing something that is used so little that most developers who have put time and effort into it have written it off as a failure long ago.
Or maybe you're missing the point, which is that Google will drop you like a used condom as soon as they decide your unpaid work on their latest shiny bag of hipster hype isn't making them enough money.
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your unpaid work
Who's unpaid work? Surely not the developers who are creating platforms using the APIs. Which ultimately die due to lack of users. But hey let's keep it open. I'm sure the developers will be just as happy with an abandoned API in a wasteland of no users as they would with a closed one, but let's all jump on the crap on Google bandwagon because we can right?!
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Who's unpaid work? Surely not the developers who are creating platforms using the APIs.
No, I'm referring to all the people who don't work for the Almighty Google, who code stuff up using Google's APIs, trying to build something interesting. Which is why they released the fucking API in the first place- so people could build stuff that uses it and (hopefully) make it popular.
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So as i was implying:
a) this isn't unpaid work.
b) closing the API is completely irrelevant when there are no users using it. The "unpaid developers" don't care at this point.
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So as i was implying:
a) this isn't unpaid work.
b) closing the API is completely irrelevant when there are no users using it. The "unpaid developers" don't care at this point.
a) No, it's unpaid work. I'm sorry if you're having difficulty understanding that idea. Google doesn't pay them, no one pays them, it's unpaid work.
b) There are people using it, just not in the numbers that Google would like to see. Or are you claiming that there is literally not a single person, not one, using Google Hangouts?
c) Furthermore, my original comment was about Google's services in general, not just Hangouts.
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a) No, it's unpaid work. I'm sorry if you're having difficulty understanding that idea. Google doesn't pay them, no one pays them, it's unpaid work.
a) Because google doesn't pay them doesn't mean it's unpaid. Do you expect Microsoft to cut you a check everytime you write a Win32 App?
b) There are few people using it. The entire service is a wasteland, a failed product. Thanks for claiming everything needs to be absolute. I guess the one person still running a PDP-11 in a museum should be grounds for DEC to keep supporting it for ever right?
c) Your original comment applies to most of the bitching that goes on about Google closing services. There's only a
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Because google doesn't pay them doesn't mean it's unpaid.
No, what makes it "unpaid" is that nobody pays them. That's kind of the definition.
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Do you expect Microsoft to cut you a check everytime you write a Win32 App?
No, and if no one paid me to write that app, that would mean the work I did was "unpaid".
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There are few people using it. The entire service is a wasteland, a failed product. Thanks for claiming everything needs to be absolute.
Oh please, I never claimed any such thing- you were the one that said, and I quote, "...when there are no users using it". But it's nice to see that you admit there were people who were using it (even though you have no idea how many).
Roll 20 (Score:4, Interesting)
Decent cross platform video chat? (Score:1)
I had to use Hangouts one year for a group chat with people on a team in different countries. Hangouts was so terrible by the end we had all switched to audio only... so we were really doing a conference call. Where the audio quality sucked. It was free though, I'll give it props for that.
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But for family get togethers they are perfect. My family tried most video conferencing programs and eventually settled on Hangouts as the easiest for the oldies to handle. Google screwed us with the new G+ interface last year, as they dropped (or hid it so well none of us could find it) the Hangouts tools and we had to migrate everyone to hangouts.google.com to get going again.
Anyone able to suggest an alternative?
We need it to be cross platform, as we have a dozen family members on 3 continents using diffe
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As long as you're not running Linux, Camfrog Video Chat or Skype works just fine and at least neither of those are going away any time soon unlike Hangouts.
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Cam Frog looks bloody awful. I can tell from their tiered service plans, which I can't even copy/paste here since their website is horrendously broken.
Sorry, a few of us use Linux, so it's a no-go anyway...
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Camfrog USED to be good. Used to be you could buy a lifetime pro code.
But as far as multi-user video chat goes, nothing beats Camfrog. It's so good PalTalk bought the rights to use their software.
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Oh, and to boot, you don't HAVE to pay. If you're doing family stuff where it's two families, each in their own room, the free single-user view side works just fine. Even under Linux + Wine.
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Cheers, I'll take a second look. Unfortunately we have multiple people across lots of varied platforms, which is what drew us to Hangouts in the first place.
I realise that Hangouts is still here, it's just the API that's being discontinued. But as others have pointed out, it probably means the site is going to be canned at some point in the near future.
Why do they keep doing this? (Score:5, Interesting)
10 Get everybody using a new thing
20 Get it working well enough that they're finally used to it
30 GOTO 10
Just fix the shit you already made. You do not need two or three parallel solutions for every service you want to attempt to provide.
Re:Why do they keep doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this still complex for people after 15+ years? Google's business is selling ads to an audience made captive by "free" email and search (I include Maps here) paid for by the privacy of that audience. The rest of what they do is wanking because they have more money than they know what to do with, the incremental info they get from most of these projects is nil. Google "strategy" these days is to make an inferior copy of other people's ideas, try to leverage their captive audience by strong-arming them and then failing anyway. People have been ripping on Apple lately, but Google is in exactly the same "no-innovation" spiral. They are ripe for disruption, it is only a matter of time.
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Wish I had some mod points right now. Your comment deserves a wide audience.
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It's so funny how companies like Google or Microsoft or even Apple never seem to get really good at anything beyond what they're good at.
Apple managed to reinvent itself from computer company to mostly a smartphone maker, Google managed to do search/advertising and Android, and Microsoft managed Windows/Office/SQL but at the end of the day they just can't overcome the internal inertia of these products and become more than that.
Microsoft at least has the path to Azure, but it's really the same products sold
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Most of these programs segfault at 10.
Duo or Allo? And where is text chat? (Score:2)
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Down with big business... lingo (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Going/moving forward" is not the same as "soon", it means "starting immediately* and continuing until informed otherwise".
I normally try to avoid jargon that spawns from Management, but I find "going forward" to be softer/indirect language than "from now on" which I take to be more authoritative/direct. If I managed people I would use "from now on" in conversations with them when I want to firmly set/change something, but when communicating with other people (particularly external contacts) and I want the
Something about repeating history, poorly (Score:1)
The rise of the PC had a lot to do with gaining independence from mainframe operators. That's why it's called Personal Computer. At the end of the PC age, what do we get (again)? Companies keeping programs on their systems, for us to use only at their whim. Companies deciding which apps can be distributed through their app stores, based on their sole discretion. But it's all soooo convenient, isn't it?
Why Google Hangouts didn't get used (Score:2, Interesting)
Because everyone knows that any Google side project is subject to being suddenly abandoned with minimal notice.
wtf google (Score:3)
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What feature of Duo are you missing in Hangouts? Hangouts seems superior in every way.
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I wouldn't be surprised if Duo and Hangouts used the exact same encoder and had the same quality.
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It's a stupid reason. A Google account is much more convenient then a phone number. When you are on Android you need a Google account anyways. At least you can use your Google account on your PC.
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So what's the alternative? (Score:2)
It'd be one thing if Hangouts had been replaced by something that had feature parity, but Duo is something else entirely and is not a replacement. For example, in my circles of family and friends, Hangouts is used almost exclusively and we split our use about 50/50 between desktop (browser) and mobile. We depend on seamless migration of chats synchronized between devices. Last I knew, Duo was tied to your phone # and so didn't allow multiple device access and had no desktop component. Has that changed?
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This.
This is what people don't understand with all these "messaging" solutions. Being able to reply from a PC is important. Why would I reply on a shitty smartphone when I sit in front of a PC with a real keyboard for hours every day?
Typical Google Shotgun Failure (Score:2)
Google's real good at churn and burn.
But they absolutely SUCK at refining products unless they're an immediate hit.
Look at GMail and all the work that's been lavished on that.
Now look at something like Hangouts. It never really caught on, mostly because other community options were VASTLY more mature and dependable.
So, did Google work on it, to grow it and make it a better product?
Nope.
They basically tossed it out like a puppy that'd peed the rug.
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And you people are still surprised? (Score:2)
The only things you can use from Google right now* are search, maps, ads.
* subject to change without notice.
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Some bloatware which is pushed into your phone on any day soon. Every single Google application is nowadays a system component which can not be removed, even though nobody actually uses them. Perhaps some day business management will learn, that force has never gained them any happy customers. Google is quickly gaining same kind of hatred among people as Microsoft did on its peak.
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FTFY
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They aren't shutting down Hangouts. They're shutting down the API for 3rd parties that leverage it. If you use the Hangouts app on your phone you're fine.
Isn't that better? Excluding one word in your reply could have made you 100% less of a dick.
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And Google Voice. Google is a hot mess of disjointed, half-assed messaging/voice/video apps.