The problem there is that RCS is being held up by your carrier and the rollout is an absolutely frustrating disaster. Google would rather you use their Messages app with RCS, a more advanced version of SMS. Hangouts Chat might takeover for regular Hangouts next year on some level, though that’s not a guarantee. That focus led to Hangouts Chat and Meet in 2017, all while regular Hangouts suffered. It told us Hangouts wouldn’t die because of Allo, only to admit a couple of months later it wouldn’t see much support and would get a business focus instead. Google decided it wanted to compete with WhatsApp so it created and then killed Allo. Of course, that was six years ago and a whole bunch of stuff has happened since. With every mention of Hangouts in that first year, it became easier and easier to invest in it as the messaging platform for me and those I talked the most with. It supported multiple accounts and worked on as many devices as you needed it to, with full syncing between them all.Īs Google turned its focus to Hangouts, they told us it was everything. Since almost all of us have Google accounts, finding friends or starting conversations was dead simple. It was an easy switch because Google let you jump into it with your Google account and made an app available to everyone out of the gate. When it was introduced in 2013 (!), I talked everyone into making the switch to it and they did. I’ve been so heavily invested in Hangouts that some of the group conversations have years’ worth of history. I’d say that 90% of my digital communication with friends and family happens through Google Hangouts. Instead, as the title suggests, I just want to talk about how I feel trapped by it even as there are more than a couple messaging services that should probably replace it on my phone. I’m not necessarily writing about its death, though, because we know it’ll live on in some form or another through Hangouts Chat or as the poorly supported and dated version we have now. The writing has been on the wall for Hangouts for longer than I can remember and yet here I am, writing a piece about it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |