WTF Google releasing more chat clients

For now, clients like Adium and Pidgin (my multichat of choice) still work, but I fear for that when they kill the Hangouts API in April…

The protocol may. They killed the client a while back though. And turned the Android app into Hangouts, which as previously discussed, sucks.

Hangouts is great… For a while it lacked features that talk had, but it’s now beyond it. It’s fine.

I actually got allo, and I seriously could not figure out what the point was. It seemed like it was hangouts… But lacking some features? I seriously could not understand what it was, or what the point was supposed to be. At some point they said they were going to replace hangouts with it?

I don’t understand what Google is doing. They make some good stuff, but this stuff is confusing and weird.

I’m curious about their take on Slack, and its integration with the other Google apps/services could make it interesting. Some more competition doesn’t hurt. I like Slack, but I don’t think it’s worth paying $7 per month/user for the Pro features. (Also: Yeah, I know about Discord.)

I’m an Android user myself, and I know lots of Android users since it has a higher market share over here. I don’t know a single person who has used Allo or Duo. Not once.

Maybe a small part. But, speaking for my company at least, Slack is popular because Skype sucks and Slack mostly doesn’t.

It still doesn’t show whether my friends are online or not, which is like the most baseline fundamental necessity short of the actual exchange of messages.

It does this.

It’s done this for years now. I agree, it was one of its most glaring deficiencies, but it added it a while back.

It absolutely doesn’t. Even the desktop/web version doesn’t do it properly - just a green light if they’re active, while failing to distinguish between “idle” and “offline”, which is a hugely fucking important distinction. But the Android version doesn’t do it at all, and that’s the version I need to show it most.

Well, it tells you how long ago they were using hangouts, which is kind of what you want, isn’t it?

Not really. And it doesn’t display that information conveniently even if it were, because it doesn’t start with the contact list.

Yeah, I guess I don’t notice that because I just already have hangouts open with everyone I talk to, so the lost of hangouts shows that activity time.

It doesn’t, no. It shows the last time there was a message, which is significantly less useful.

Hmm, guess you’re right.
Well, there’s always Allo!

I don’t think anyone use Hnagout at all in Asia. It’s WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Slack. I’m not surprise that Google is trying to eye that piece of international pie.

It’s Google, so imagine they’ll drop support for years new apps in 2 years time.

As far as I can tell Hangouts remains the only SMS app from Google that can be set as default in Android that will integrate your GV number.

WhatsApp is preferred by most of my Asian counterparts, but the huge exception is KakoaTalk. And since we’re owned by a South Korean company where that is based, none of them want to use anything but that outside of work.

Back to the Microsoft and Skype mention. We’re a heavy Skype for Business shop, which isn’t half bad. But what annoys the fuck out of me is that it’s basically just rebranded Lync. It is not Skype free, and trying to mix the two just forces you to have to clients loaded up, both named Skype, with only a color difference on the icon. So imagine a large user base of idiots out there, many of them coming in and wondering why a Skype contact on one of them doesn’t work on the other. I want to shoot the motherfucker that thought that was a good idea.

Yes Skype for Business is absolutely rebranded Lync. It has nothing to do with Skype. It works OK for chat, both 1-1 and 1-many, but the collaboration features are complete garbage. We set it up to save money on Webex fees and it sucked so bad that everybody still uses Webex.

Of course xkcd has something to say about this.

Oh god it’s my current digital social life