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A Decade and a Half of Instability: The History of Google Messaging Apps (arstechnica.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Speaking of Google killing a product, ArsTechnica has a rundown on the company's 16 years long effort to dominate the messaging space to no success. From the report: Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today. Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old) -- Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases -- or user goodwill -- forward into the present day. Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. [...]
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A Decade and a Half of Instability: The History of Google Messaging Apps More

A Decade and a Half of Instability: The History of Google Messaging Apps

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  • Silver lining. (Score:3)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @01:31PM (#61732805) Journal

    Everyone complaining about Google dominance should be dancing in the streets with this bit of news.

    • Re:Silver lining. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @01:43PM (#61732837) Homepage Journal

      Google has never dominated in messaging.

      Hangouts was the pinnacle, it was basically perfect. I don't know why they felt the need to kill it. No revenue stream perhaps, but Android needs a decent messenger and video chat app.

      • The new integration with Gmail is making me rethink Google for messaging. Who thought it was a great idea to put it in the same app as my email? Now notification badges indicating the number of emails I have are conflated with the number of messages. It also feels much less real time, there is a send and receive delay before displaying locally. And now it's more clicks to get to a message, especially if you switch between multiple accounts as it resets you out of the message you were in and you have to choo

      • Product managers looking to disrupt something or other

      • Google dominates in only one thing, advertising. Everything else is cross-subsidised from advertising revenue: They either use sheer brute force to muscle into an area, or they treat it as a distraction to be dropped at any point.

        In general anything that doesn't directly impact advertising revenue is a distraction, or is in line to be designated a distraction. This makes any "free" service from Google waaaay too expensive to work with.

    • Googles Dominance scary stuff is different than say 20 years ago with Microsofts Dominance scary stuff.

      With Microsoft we would be happy when one of their products failed, because that would be one more opening for a competing product to prosper and grow.
      While with Google they are collecting so much data on us already, a service not used or failed, isn't a real win for us at all.

  • "A Decade and a Half of Instability" (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sounds like my marriage.

  • It's seems to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @01:47PM (#61732849) Homepage Journal

    If Google's product de jour isn't an instant wildly popular success, it's killed off.
    Here's a hint Google: success takes time, have some patience with your products.

    Oh, and quit mucking with their UI.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Its more than that though, the category this article, Google Pay the other day, Music last year, and I'm sure others is that Google has an existing product but for a perverse reason people within Google are incentivized to relaunch from scratch with a less comprehensive solution, rather than try to improve the existing solution.

      • This... holy shit. I mean, Google could literally have just rebranded Google Play Music as "YouTube Music" with a lick of paint on the app and that honestly would've been fine. Instead they killed it for an app with half the functionality working in opaque and unpredictable ways or just flat out missing/broken. And instead of rolling in some of the code from Music, they just killed it to force users onto their new platform?

        I still never got that decision. I used GPM all the time. As soon as I saw what a tra

  • grandcentral, umm I mean Google Voice, has been my main phone number for a long, long time.

    Back when I first got my phone number, it was long distance from my now long disconnected home phone.

  • I used to use google to send money back and forth between friends, using what I think use to be google wallet. They then retired google wallet and seemingly replaced it with google send or something like that but you had to sign up for an whole new account and as far as I can tell it was basically the same thing Then they re-branded it again forcing you to migrate apps to just GPay , and again as far as I can tell these 3 products basically did the same thing, I have no idea why they keep killing an old p

  • Skype (Score:3)

    by cowdung ( 702933 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @01:57PM (#61732893)

    At least it's not as embarrassing and Skype that had a dominance in the voice area and wasn't able to translate it to the messaging area. Now even Zoom surpasses them.

    But in the end message apps are fleeting: ICQ, Microsoft Messenger, etc.. history is full of these apps that were abandoned almost as quickly as they appeared.

    • ICQ was stable and at least somewhat popular for around 20 years. Definitely not an example of a quickly-abandoned system.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bodie1 ( 1347679 )

        Which 20? Seems it rose and fell in just a few years in the mid to late 90's.

        • A bit less than 20, I guess. I keep thinking it came out in the early 1990's, but the first release was 1996. It was still widely used until the early 2010's, so it might have been closer to 15 years than 20. Still a significantly longer lifespan that any of Google's messaging systems.

      • I think the problem with ICQ is that people moved from messaging on the desktop to messaging on phones, and their mobile app was garbage.

  • Once Google moved away from XMPP (or at least interoperability with it), I pretty much quit using their messaging services. Whatsapp charged $1, so that was out, and no one I knew used Hangouts. It was SMS until I started using Telegram almost a decade ago, and although I regret how much of a conspiracy/qanon trap it has become, it does offer me the best of all feature set. The only thing that bothers me, and it's not enough to make me stop using it, is that your non-secret chat history is stored server-sid
    • The XMPP gateway still works, at least for basic messages. I use a desktop Linux client that's working fine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N7DR ( 536428 )

        The XMPP gateway still works, at least for basic messages. I use a desktop Linux client that's working fine.

        Do you have pointers to how to make this work? It stopped working for me several years ago [probably when Hangouts replaced Talk], and I just tried it again with no success. But I could easily believe that there is now some set of more-or-less arcane steps that have to be followed -- but I couldn't find anything relevant; everything I found was old information.

        • I use Kopete, so I can't guarantee it will work for other clients. The Jabber ID is my @gmail.com email address, the server is gmail.com, the port is 5222, and I have "Allow plain-text password authentication" enabled. If you have 2FA enabled and get password errors, you may need to create an "app password".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by niff ( 175639 )

      Features, memory effectiveness, privacy and security are all useless if your friends, family and coworkers are using a different messenger.

    • Yes that is the reason: they don't want. The technical solution is trivial and out there for decades. But providing cloud storage is expensive. If the data in it is also encrypted.. what would the provider gain out of it?
      • I'm trying to come up with an argument that if it was easy, someone would be incentivized to do it to win market share, but I can't.

    • No one I knew used Hangouts either and I still loved it. At one point, it could send/receive Google Voice SMS. The only person I communicated with using a Google account was my wife. Everyone else was SMS. Still had the best UI of any texting app I've used to date.

    • I have a couple of standard XMPP clients that do E2E encryption with OMEMO. I use Conversations on my Android device and Gajim on my desktop.

      • Yeah, I purchased Conversations just to support it even though I have no contacts that use the network. OMEMO etc is great, but the "cloud history" portion is missing. Log in on any device and access your complete history.
  • "no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products"

    Oracle still seems to be a thing, somehow.

  • No Cost for Failure (Score:3)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @02:07PM (#61732919)

    I think the problem is that for managers of products there is no cost for failure. If you launch a successful product Google rewards you handsomely, if it fails you can walk into a new job based on leading a product launch at Google.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by thsths ( 31372 )

      Yes, maybe that is it. I understand the idea of "fail fast - improve fast". But if you fail time and time again in the same place, you have to wonder what is going wrong. And someone should finally take responsibility.

    • I'm always surprised by the sheer number of product managers they have. I always believed a true coder at heart doesn't want to be a manager, they want to write beautiful code that does something -- even something menial -- in the most efficient and elegant way possible. So these managers, do they care about code and code quality or just ladder climbing? That said, it's a private company, so who am I to question how they choose to operate. The shareholders seem to be happy with performance.

  • All Downhill since Jabber (Score:5, Informative)

    by thsths ( 31372 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @02:16PM (#61732945)

    Google Talk was great when it came out. Instant messaging was still new (AIM had been around for a while), and Google Talk offered interoperability with Jabber. Many apps would support Google Talk, but the GMail web client was fine, too. You could search both emails and messenges in one interface, it was great.

    Now it has all gone to shits. First they stopped Jabber, then they rebranded, then they were chasing Whatsapp with Duo, and now we are back with Google Talk, but it is substandard compared to the competition. And for some reason, Google sometimes recommends Jitsi, which is great open source, but really not quite the same as other video solutions.

    It is all very confusing. Facebook made the same mistake with Facebook Messenger, I think.

    • Re:All Downhill since Jabber (Score:5, Informative)

      by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <.voyager529. .at. .yahoo.com.> on Thursday August 26, 2021 @03:12PM (#61733137)

      Google Talk was great when it came out. Instant messaging was still new (AIM had been around for a while)

      And that's just it: Google refused to learn from, of *all* people, AOL.

      AIM hadn't just been around for a while, it was around for a decade prior to Google Talk as a standalone product, and the functionality was implemented in regular AOL service for some years prior to that.

      The official AIM protocol was big on compatibility. If you had AIM 1.0, and kept it until the day AIM died in 2017, you could use it to send IMs to anyone using the absolute latest version of AIM. The protocol also worked with Pidgin and Trillian and Digsby and a few other third party clients, but at no point was a version of AIM unable to send and receive instant messages with anyone else using AIM. There were other features added here and there (voice chat and file transfers were awkward in the dial-up era), but text-based real-time communication? It just worked.

      Then, there's Google. The original Talk application was Jabber-based, so third party clients could use the service. Then they silo'd it up so you had to use the official Google Talk...then there was Buzz and Wave that didn't last for two years, but they merged all three of those into Hangouts, which also had a kinda-web-version, then there was Duo and Allo, then we were back to Hangouts, which handled SMS, but Duo didn't, now there isn't Hangouts anymore, but there is Messages which replaced Hangouts for SMS, and Messages can use RCS but Hangouts can't, but Messages isn't compatible with Duo, Allo is discontinued, and I can do video chat between Android phones that kinda works, I think...

      This problem was solved by AOL 30 years ago, but apparently is too complicated for Google to figure out. Someone, somewhere, should be able to figure out that if something depends on the network effect to be useful, that fragmenting your own userbase repeatedly is the worst possible way to ensure the success of such a service.

      • Then, there's Google. The original Talk application was Jabber-based, so third party clients could use the service. Then they silo'd it up so you had to use the official Google Talk...then there was Buzz and Wave that didn't last for two years, but they merged all three of those into Hangouts, which also had a kinda-web-version, then there was Duo and Allo, then we were back to Hangouts, which handled SMS, but Duo didn't, now there isn't Hangouts anymore, but there is Messages which replaced Hangouts for SMS, and Messages can use RCS but Hangouts can't, but Messages isn't compatible with Duo, Allo is discontinued, and I can do video chat between Android phones that kinda works, I think...

        This is the most succinct description of Google's messaging system that I've ever seen.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Baleet ( 4705757 )
        I wish I had mod points for you.

  • projects run by sociopaths (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kalieaire ( 586092 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @02:26PM (#61732975)

    i keep hearing from random friends that work at google that the vps are varying levels of sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies.

    like you'll have a director that berates the lowest members of the team their leading til they cry and also at the same time take credit for all the hard work. basically driving all their employees to quit. there're also reports of sexual harassment amongst other managers and directors. if they're low enough they kick them out but support their move to a different org like fb or something other tech org in the valley. if they're high enough, then they shift them into a different team or product within the org to keep them in the family. if they're really really high, they pay them a fat bonus and let them go.

    it seems like tech management is teeming with mental health issues and there's a trickle down effect to everyone that works under that management. google being one of the early mega tech businesses is a host of all these types of bad actors.

    • Half-baked theory: Any firehose of money will attract sociopaths and narcissists. In the 1500s it was the papacy and indulgences, today it's Google and adwords.
    • Managers are, on the whole, a waste. That they are, on the whole, a bunch of assholes was something already well known.

  • Lack of a native client. Seriously. Every messaging solution google has presented has been browser-only.

    You can't get notifications on mobile from a web page that is closed. You can't get notifications on a desktop for a web page that isn't open either.

    Any messaging solution that expects everyone to open a web page and keep it open all the time is going to fail. Period.

    • Re:The reason for all of these google failures is. (Score:4, Informative)

      by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @02:36PM (#61733001)

      There was a native client for Google Talk. There is now a Hangouts chrome extension (which is not that bad if you have chrome installed).

      Compare that to Facebook Messenger (web only), Whatsapp (even worse, need to piggy back on a phone) or iMessage (Apple-only) and that's VERY good.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Messenger is not web only. I could have a desktop app for messenger or an iphone app (assuming of course I wanted facebook spying on me everywhere I go).

        And a "chrome extension" only works if chrome is up and running, and only for desktop, not mobile chrome.

        Native apps on desktops and mobile are the only way to success in this game. You can't get by with web-only.

        • You are right, it seems I missed the fact that they launched a desktop client in April 2020. Better late than never.
          Chrome starts automatically in the background so that the hangouts extension starts and put an icon in the tray. You don't need the chrome extension on mobile, as native apps are available, since forever (there was a Google Talk on the firsts versions of Android).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

        Since when is FBM web only? What is it I have on my phone and used earlier today?

        • There is also a native Hangouts client for phones. I think the OP was talking about computers (windows/linux/macOS).

    • This makes no sense, unless this a trolling attempt. The Google Hangouts iOS app I used a few years ago wasn't a "web page." It ran in the background, popped up notifications, and probably listened in and Lord knows what else...lol.

      • Desktop. The desktop "app" was tied to Chrome. But not in as bad of a way as the new Chat app.

      • I think OP was talking about a native client for desktop operating systems (see Signal, WhatsApp,etc...). In this case, it's true that G[chat/hang/duo/etc] does not offer a native desktop client. However, since the popularity of these messaging situations is mainly driven by smartphone use, I do not think this is the cause of the lack of popularity of G[chat/hang/duo/etc]

    • The semi-native Hangouts app was way better than the browser-tied Google Chat app.

      And once they dropped Google Voice support in Hangouts, it's been a nightmare. I wanted unified personal communications on all my devices with notifications on all. They had it. They killed it.

      • This is why I quit FI and switched. Having every single part of my service in hangouts was awesome, chat, sms, voice calls, voicemail, transcriptions, no matter what device I was on or where my phone was. I believe a lot of that still works if you are a FI user, but only if you are a FI user which is probably the reason hangouts hasnt been completely retired because its so tied into a commercial service that they are trying to figure out how to kill.

        Once they said they were killing hangouts though I figured

  • All messaging apps kinda suck. I've turned against Apple in the past several years, but it seems like iMessage is probably one of the best messaging apps. However, supposedly its functionality really degrades when a non-Apple user is included in a conversation. The problem is ultimately a lack of standards. E-mail is available via a ton of desktop and web-based apps thanks to being backed by a standard: SMTP. However, messaging did not have a standard defined in the early days of the internet. XMPP ca

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

      Adhering to XMPP wouldn't solve the problems that messaging apps have today, unless XMPP was extended far beyond its original form. E2E encryption. Multiple groups, multiple devices, all sorts of message types, such as multimedia, and contacts and locations and emojis and what-not.

      SMTP works because MTAs are store-and-forward services. How do you do that for messaging, which is intended to be as close to realtime as possible?

      • XMPP does E2E encryption: https://conversations.im/omemo... [conversations.im]
        On my Android device I use Conversations and on my desktop I use it with Gajim.

      • Of course the original XMPP standard would need to be updated to keep up with the times. If it had been available and adopted by all of the messaging clients 25+ years ago, it could have progressed organically as needs arose. Numerous other standards I mentioned, such as HTTP and SMTP, have been updated over the years to meet new requirements. However, I agree that XMPP has no hope of being adopted now.

        As far as messaging being realtime, it still uses a protocol, which can be standardized. XMPP is co

  • Apple is consistent... consistently don't work well with the rest of the world.

    • Well, to be honest they are a very significant share of the US market, and their global share is pretty significant too. With iOS updates keeping the vast majority of those users running the same OS version, it's a fantastic lock-in. Apple doesn't let OEMs load up the phone with bloatware, everyone has iMessage, it's tied in directly with SMS, and they don't allow non-apple SMS apps.

      Even after years of trying to reduce it, Android still very fragmented, and phone vendors bloat it up with their own awful
  • That's par for the course for Google.
  • It would have been useful if the summary said what the Google Messaging app is called to day. I have 13 messaging apps on my phone, working for a multinational with coworkers around the globe and several major companies in Silicon Valley they all want to use a different IM app. So I am sure I have Google's current one installed but I am not sure what it is called this week.
  • Shut it down. Don't modify it if its unprofitable, just get rid of it. Its the google MO.

  • They're funneling people towards Google Chat but it's a pain in the ass.

    I tried to view a picture someone sent me on it, but when I tap on it so I could zoom in, it tried to view it in an external program Google Drive which I don't have installed. Being on mobile bandwidth with a cap, I didn't want to download and install it. Basically I was SOL.

    In Hangouts it just opens normally in the app.

    In Chat, both people's messages in the conversation appear to the right, on same side. On hangouts it was different si

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thsths ( 31372 )

      I agree, Chat feels like a cheap demo of a messaging app. It is absolutely not ready for prime time.

    • Honestly the best thing Google could do at this point is just announce "oops we fucked up! We'll be sticking with Hangouts after all" and just let it be.

      But no.

  • It's one of the most baffling things I've seen a company of their size do.
    At one point they practically were the internet.

    They've endlessly messed up messaging, god knows how many different products they've now made and cancelled.

    There is still in 2021 no stable messaging system to contact people on.

    SMS / Text
    Email
    FB Messenger
    Whatsapp
    Signal
    Telegram
    iMessage
    Viber (Does this still exist?)

    I won't even list the current google messaging product, because I literally don't know what it is. The last one I used wa

  • poor connection reliability (Score:3)

    by short ( 66530 ) on Thursday August 26, 2021 @06:43PM (#61733905) Homepage
    The problem is Google Hangouts still uses XMPP [wikipedia.org] which uses TCP. In the mobile world of poor signal and changing connectivity (WiFi<->WiFi<->LTE) the timeouts are too long to be usable. Google developed QUIC but why they do not run Hangouts XMPP over QUIC [wikipedia.org]?

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