Google Chat To Fully Replace Classic Hangouts for Workspace Users from March (theverge.com) 31
If you're a Google Workspace user, the classic Hangouts messaging service will start to disappear next month as part of the transition to Google Chat. From a report: Google has announced that it'll make Google Chat its default chat application beginning March 22nd, meaning users will be redirected to Chat when they try to visit Hangouts in Gmail on the web, or try to use the old Hangouts mobile apps. The shift from Google Hangouts to Google Chat is the latest step in Google's constantly evolving messaging strategy, which generally gets more confusing the more you read about it. This particular migration kicked into gear in June 2020, and focusses on the messaging service integrated with Gmail. Google Chat should not be confused with GChat, the unofficial name for Google Talk, which was officially killed off in 2017 and replaced with -- you guessed it -- Hangouts.
Nooooo (Score:5, Informative)
I truly detest Google Chat. I've been a daily Hangouts user for more than a decade.
Chat inserts binary attachments as links that open in a a browser window rather than inline. That blows.
Also, it seems that if I mute the notifications in Gmail, it also silences the notifications in the Android app. If I leave things be, I get notified in both Gmail and from the Google Chat application. This is the behavior I've seen on two Android phones, multiple Android tablets and across PCs where I use Gmail on the web.
This is definitely a cold, dead hands kind of deal for me.
Re:Nooooo (PopeRatzo is Jim Nitti) (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Kind of. It used to be a standard messaging protocol. Then it moved to a closed system. At one time it had the capability of integrating with your SMS messaging application. Generally Hangouts was the thing that survived the death penalty imposed on other Google-backed IM products.
It keeps evolving. If Google Chat evolves to be exactly like Hangouts is now, so that I don't have to complain about getting notifications for it from multiple sources, and so I can see inline attachments again, I don't care what
Re: (Score:2)
Hangouts was originally the dream. Perfect integration of Google Voice with all services. Voicemail and SMS to Google Voice both came into the app.
Re: (Score:2)
At one time I had a fully integrated Google Voice number, but since I refuse to use SMS, I had Voice ship any text messages over to email, where I could respond transparently and apply more filters and automation logic. I truly don't want people to have my phone number, and Voice made it possible to get things to work the way I wanted them.
As I understand it, I can now port my existing number to Google Voice, but when I asked my cell provider, they acted like they didn't know what I wanted, and eventually I
Re: (Score:2)
Number porting happens from the receiving carrier's side. You initiate the request with Google and they validate with your current carrier. If you simply port the number away, your line gets shut off. You'll want to activate a new number, do a partial port to get the old number moved to Google and then swap the SIM with the new number into your current phone. It's much easier to do when already changing carriers. In my case, I just wanted a number in my local area code. So I activated a prepay phone a
Re: (Score:2)
Currently XMPP with my Google accounts still seems to be working for me in Pidgin. Not sure if this is a fluke or what. Pidgin does have a plugin to support hangouts somehow, but it never worked for me. But XMPP is still working. Did they just forget to turn off a server somewhere, or is this by design? With Google it's impossible to know.
Re: (Score:1)
Same here. I still chat with quite a few people on GTalk via pidgin. I really hope they don't discontinue it.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, Chat still doesn't support Android Auto. Hangouts personal has been shut down without Chat being finished.
Re: (Score:2)
I was very happy with Hangouts but hate Chat too. The fact that it's integrated into the Gmail app is a huge pain in the arse, because it takes multiple taps to go from chat to mail, one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom. It couldn't have been designed to be more awkward.
I'd love to know why Hangouts had to be killed off. It was perfect, it did everything well, the app was minimal but fully featured.
Re: (Score:2)
I really liked the hangouts iOS client which I really just used to SMS via Google Voice- as someone living in the US who's not a teen or works directly in technology, there's little point in trying to get anyone, en masse, to use anything besides SMS anyway in my experience (maybe iMessage is the exception but that's sort of the same thing technically)
Now the latest incarnation of the google voice client (web and iOS), is only just good enough to not bother doing something involved to switch off of that sy
Re: (Score:2)
Hangouts did it all. Simple text messaging via the internet or via SMS. Multimedia messaging via the internet or MMS. Voice chat. Video chat.
Nice simple, lightweight app. Usable on desktop via the website.
It was flawless.
Re: (Score:2)
no wonder google got rid of it
Re: (Score:2)
If I leave things be, I get notified in both Gmail and from the Google Chat application. This is the behavior I've seen on two Android phones, multiple Android tablets and across PCs where I use Gmail on the web.
This is by design.
No, really, Google did this intentionally.
The official solution is to disable notifications for the Google Chat app and get them through the Gmail app instead.
Seriously. [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I have tried most of the solutions they listed to "get fewer notifications" but I have not found a combination that leads to only getting one notification per device from Google Chat specifically, as long as I use both Google Chat and Gmail. I have what I'll go ahead and call a metric fuckton of devices sitting around. My home sounds like churchbells if someone starts talking to me while I don't happen to have Hangouts/Chat open.
Even worse, I truly do not want Chat integrated with Gmail. It's entirely too m
Re: (Score:2)
I have never even noticed the switch to “Hangouts”; I am still using the same XMPP connection I used for “Google Talk” on a third party client a very long time ago, and it continues to work, and apparently connects with “Hangouts” users.
Google is fickle (Score:5, Insightful)
Just make up you're damned mind already and stick with one thing!
Re: (Score:2)
I don't understand why they have to change things every few years. The right way to do this is incremental changes and improvements, while keeping the basic experience the same. Anything else confuses users and creates distrust in the company.
Re: (Score:2)
Google's business decisions smack of managerial churn. Every time somebody new gets hired or promoted in a decision making position, they have to make their mark by throwing out perfectly functioning software / services and replacing them with something worse. Why it's almost always universally true that the new something is worse has to stem from the business itself. I'm sure the root cause is some form of incompetence, boosted by how far removed the management team must be from the end-users so they ne
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously. My all-remote company has historically used Hangouts for meetings but they keep moving everything around. We can't constantly be taking time to keep up with it, we have actual work to do over here. Google keeps proving itself undependable, and that's a great way to lose at B2B.
Future Headline (Score:2)
Google to replace Google Chat with Google New Chat.
Only question is how far in the future this headline is. Six months? A year? Two years?
Re: (Score:2)
Average time seems to be about 1.7 years..
Maybe we should all be using Google PAY Chat! (Score:2)
Yep, there's even group chat and support for emojis: https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]
But seriously now I've lost track of Google's shenanigans. It really shouldn't be SO complicated to make things as standard as possible and just let them grow instead of starting from scratch each time. All the name changes, moving the chat thing in Gmail app (!), swapping SMS apps all the time and so on don't help at all. With this new RCS thing that's supposed to replace EVERYTHING from SMS to WhatsApp they managed the p
Google Managers = bunch of drama queens. (Score:3)
Amazon focuses on, "what can I use this person for, how quickly this person can turn productive?"
Google focuses on, "How good is this person in technical knowledge? How creative, innovative, out of the box thinker this candidate is?"
The problem with creative, innovative, out of the box thinkers with great technical knowledge is: They detest less than perfect solutions from other teams. Google managers constantly underestimate the effort and resources needed to deliver a "perfect" solution. The other team is also staffed by equally talented people, and if their solution is not "perfect" or "elegant", there is likely to be a good reason for it. But, they constantly over estimate their own ability, under estimate the other team's ability and the under estimate the effort needed. Thus slippages, incompatible duplicated functionality, each manager essentially "forking" his/her own code base/interface.
Amazon level of focusing on immediate productivity is also bad, it will eventually lead to a bunch of imperfect, hastily put together, buggy features requiring enormous maintenance.
Chat does not support any external clients (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Way more interesting than client support with XMPP is confederated servers. I setup my domain on XMPP and added the proper DNS SRV records. And viola, anyone else on XMPP that knows my email address also can reach me for a quick chat.
Web 2.0 has been about breaking the Internet. Centralizing services. Locking in users to protocols and "Apps". All for the purpose of scraping our online activity for marketing data.
I'm out of Google's sphere soon after Hangouts stops working with XMPP or Gmail stops being free
Re: (Score:2)
mod up +
Congrats on killing your product (Score:3)
I don't want chat integrated with email, and neither do most of the people I message either. We have all stopped using Google solutions for chat entirely now. For work it's Slack or Teams, for mobile it's things like Signal, Telegram, etc.
They seem to have come up with a concept of how they can integrate chat that doesn't match what anyone wants, and nothing will stop them transitioning to it. Good luck to them and the handful of users they'll have left, I guess.
Manageability (Score:1)