They’re very similar, but Discord I find has more customizable channels and bots, which make it much more useful overall.
Whatsapp: It works over the internet, but if you’re on a device that’s not your active phone, it throws a constant error box at you every few minutes saying it can’t verify your phone number on this device. It keeps doing that if you try to start the app and even if you don’t start the app. It will keep throwing that error box at you until you uninstall the app.
This happened to me on my Galaxy Nexus when i installed it on OnePlus One. This happened on OnePlus One when I installed it on Nexus 6p. And it happened this week on Nexus 6p when I installed it on Pixel 3.
On the OnePlus One this was a huge problem for me since I hadn’t backed up Whatsapp yet and already installed in on the Nexus 6p, and there was no way for me to go into the app and do the backup because it just kept throwing the error at me. I can’t remember how I finally got it backed up finally, but it was a multiple day panic affair, I remember that.
Ahh, OK. Signal works fine, even if you register with a phone number not on the current device. I use a google voice number for it.
I thought the Gmail chat is Hangout. It says it’s hang out when I hoover over it. It’s that green little quote thing that they transitioned to. The one that I see in Gmail is the one I use and care about. It’s the same one on the phone.
Dear god I hate how Google labels their stuff and just changes overnight.
That is Hangouts. It is going away.
Hangout Chat is a different (Slack-influenced) service.
Well that sucks. I use it because it is integrated with Gmail and because it’s easily used on my Android phone.
I’m sure they’ll add gmail integration to Hangouts Chat before taking the classic Hangouts away. That’s exactly what they did with Talk: the switch from Talk to Hangouts in Gmail was pretty transparent. It was the dedicated client users who actually had to do something.
Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of them taking the client away either. And I am not so sure. Hangouts used to be integrated into Google+ and that stopped a while back with no replacement. Granted, that particular integration would have gone away with Plus itself, but…
It’s of course impossible to be sure: maybe they’ll introduce yet a new chat product to replace Hangouts Chat before finishing the migration from classic Hangouts ;)
But I will bet that there’s always going to be a low-friction chat option integrated to gmail. That’s the one thing they’ve actually had success with, and that they’ve kept constant over these ridiculous strategy changes.
I remember that switch, and I remember not liking it too. If i recall correctly, it was right around that time they tried to force me into their social media crap no one wanted by making an account “for” me.
I used Adium all the time to talk to a variety of people on different chat systems, from gChat to AOL to even League of Legends (which required a little fiddling, then turned out to be yet another XMPP protocol.)
Sucked when gChat went away and I lost about half my peeps. Thankfully, many of those people were at work, and we switched over to slack a little while later, which covered those bases nicely.
I kinda wish I could use slack for my friends, not just work - can you slack with people who aren’t in the same group as you?
So this morning when I activated and verified Signal (Nexus 5X), I could not receive messages, only send them. (I only tested with a friend who also uses Signal.) When a message was sent to me, Android notified me saying to click here to unblock, or something to that effect, but doing so achieved nothing, and there was no setting that I could see in the app that was related to this. Hitting a wall, I switch my default back to Textra, and then back to the stock Android app, but the problem remained. Even uninstalling Signal entirely did nothing. Finally, I unregistered from Signal at https://signal.org/signal/unregister, and that worked. Not sure what was happening, there.
Weird. Maybe that contact was blocked somewhere. Never had that happen, but I use iOS.
Perhaps, but not intentionally, he’s my brother and we communicate fairly regularly. His girlfriend gets his texts just fine on iOS.
Yeah - right now I’m on a mix between Whatsapp (family) and Messenger (pretty much everyone else - mostly due to school and other organizations using it so heavily), for anything which is not SMS/messages. And recently Discord for game-related stuff - surprisingly good, actually.
I used to be a big hangouts fan, but I stopped using it a couple of years ago when it became clear that Google were going to abandon it.
It’s crazy how badly Google has managed this. Being able to message anyone with a google account on any device where they are logged in should be the most straightforward thing in the world. On top of that I use Google Voice as my primary SMS which acts as a natural fallback to anyone without a google account. If they want business focused versions of that, and personal focused versions of that, both should be, in essence, built on the same foundation, just organized differently for specific use cases.
They had a perfectly good messaging app in Talk. None of this other shit has been an improvement.
They really, really didn’t want to copy iMessage. That’s pretty much the long and short of it.