Mourning Hangouts

I've been an Android user for a relatively long time, since I changed from my Motorola Windows Phone many years ago. One of the biggest things that I saw come was Hangouts and I saw how it had so much more potential than Skype. Native integration and the lower power consumption (Skype on mobile was once a real hog in the background). I then also used Hangouts on the desktop and as other members of my extended family have adopted Android it has been more useful. More recently some of my wife's family in Greece have discovered Hangouts and we can use it for video calls between phones.

One of the biggest features for me is that SMS and messaging are in the same app and yet users don't need registration beyond having a Google account. Not everyone wants to use Facebook and the way Facebook went about forcing Messenger on people really irked me. I don't get why WhatsApp exists in the presence of Hangouts? To me Hangouts should have destroyed the competition, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessenger, BIM and Skype should all have suffered much more than they have.

But Hangouts has been a bit of a failure. Why? Google didn't make it easy enough to use and they haven't concentrated on it as being a product. I read somewhere else* that 'Google doesn't get platforms', well that is true but they also struggle to concentrate on anything for more than a few months before they get bored and move on to something else. It is probably reflective of the fact that Google's hiring process filters only the best applicants and most of these highly intelligent Googlers are often left doing mundane tasks. So Google suffers from some kind of lack of focus?

What is the result? Google now has three or four messaging apps for Android, I'm losing track. Hangouts is also unreliable for anything other than messaging, I can't count the number of times that I've joined a conference meeting on Hangouts and then dropped out, struggling to get back in. Most people I know who have tried Hangout for conferencing comment on reliability as being an issue. No one knows that you can make super cheap calls from Hangouts (you have to download the secret 'Hangouts Dialer' plugin on Android).

But worst of all is their failure to correctly integrate messaging and commit to it. Hangouts on Android allows you to handle SMS and Hangouts messages in the same app but by default it doesn't integrate the two in the same view! So I send hangout messages to inexperienced family members and they struggle to find them. I can't count how many times I have sent stuff to my father that he has probably never seen. A frustrating problem since the beginning has been that if you have multiple Google accounts it separates them and even if you merge SMS with one account you will miss messages in your other accounts. But finally the biggest bug? Sometimes Hangouts forgets that address book entries are the same person and so you have two or more entries for the same person in your messaging window. It has now got so bad that the Hangouts team have decided that we shouldn't be able to merge messages any more. Sure if something useful doesn't work why fix it? Just disable it.

In 2016 Google launched both Allo and Duo messaging, both targeted at different markets, but why? Google already has Hangouts and their native SMS app for those that just want SMS. Google should stick with one platform and develop it! Google doesn't have two search engines, Google doesn't have two email services, so why does it have four messaging apps? Can someone explain this to me? Can someone kick Google and get them to sit down and concentrate on one product? They could turn it around but they way things are going it is just going to continue getting in more of a mess.

If you know someone at Google then please share this post with them!

* https://searchengineland.com/the-google-doesnt-get-platforms-family-intervention-memo-96619