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Does Gmail want to be instant messaging? New UI experiment says “yes” (arstechnica.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 10 months ago (2 children)

not like Google has already tried and abandoned several instant messaging options over the years or anything …

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

At this point they could pay me per message and I wouldn't use it. I'm not goign to convince people to move just to be rug pulled again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Move to an open, safe, user-respecting option like signal. Fuck using Google stuff for more than just this reason.

[–] Telodzrum 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Instant Messaging, in particular, has been a series of failures of both vision and design by Google.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/

[–] Zak 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The golden opportunity was when Hangouts was the default SMS app on Android. The same technique has been very successful for Apple.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I still can't understand why they killed hangouts

[–] Zak 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

At the point they killed it, I do. It was an also-ran in the space with no strategy for growth. What I don't understand is why they caved to pressure from carriers for an SMS-only app as mentioned in the article, or why they keep trying to launch new chat apps that offer no unique value proposition.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

It just doesn't make sense, it worked almost identically to apples iMessage when the person was also on Android, integrated nicely with Google Voice, had a web interface and they could have just implemented RCS, instead they made allo/duo, killed those off and now we have messages, which is fine but is just sms and RCS... Just seemed like such a waste of effort to do all of that when you already had a working product with integrations already built out.

[–] Zak 3 points 10 months ago

Google is infamous for allowing valuable products to wither and die for no externally apparent reason. Hangouts, more than most was a major strategic error in my opinion.

Of course if they hadn't screwed it up third-party messaging options might be even less popular, and that would be unfortunate.