Hangouts Chat, Google’s Slack competitor, comes out of beta

Hangouts Chat, Google’s Slack competitor, comes out of beta(techcrunch.com)

21 points by schuellerpa 8 years ago | 9 comments

scrollaway 8 years ago |

Is it Hangouts Chat now? I thought it was Hangouts Meet. Or was it just Meet? Or was Meet the one that replaced Allo?

Sorry, this could be the best chat app yet, I just can't take Google seriously for messaging apps anymore. I just finished archiving all my chat logs from Google Talk and Hangouts (from Takeout) and shutting it down. I use Discord now, exclusively; for person-to-person, group DMs, managed servers (company, gaming, etc), voice, video, everything. Happy with it. It even has slack-compatible webhooks.

Hey, did you know there's no way to remove a contact from Hangouts? Once you add them, they're there forever unless you block them. Because that's how you build good messaging apps, right?

WingH 8 years ago | |

I agree. That ship has sailed long ago for me. I actually liked Google Talk, when it was incorporated to your email. Then they came out with something called Hangouts that does GodKnowsWhat.

wand3r 8 years ago |

Google really only suceeds in building extremely technical products that are much better functionally than competitors. This technology & functional advantage nets them the runway to get the UX people to fix the glaring interface issues before competitors have a working product. Examples: search, gmail, maps. They have never really been able to do a classic strategy of copying or implementing a mundane piece of software.

Like, chat for google should be easy. A social network should have been easy. A product search/market place should have been easy.

This product will be a terrible addition to the unintelligible quagmire that is chat.

foobaw 8 years ago |

Even the product lead of G Suite at Google is aware of how crazy it is (https://twitter.com/happyinwater/status/969092575687729153). I hope this implies they're doing something about all this mess.

ce4 8 years ago | |

They're aware of it far longer, this post is from 2015:

https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE

foobaw 8 years ago | | |

Just a side note but I remember seeing this then and found out that Mayur left Google after making these comments (July 2015).

myrandomcomment 8 years ago |

My team tried it when it was invite only. We hated it. We just tried it again and hated it.

Also to the other posters point, we have Gapps and I have hangouts app and meetings app on my devices. WTH? Get all this sorted to a single app please google.

acct1771 8 years ago |

Bring back XMPP or Matrix cross-compatibility, so we can set up our own server when the service disappears, or just give up, Google.

Nobody trusts you to keep a product running anymore.

sidcool 8 years ago |

I am using this and it's disconnected from the current Hangouts that we use for our business. The groups are reflected, but messages are not. Strange choice in my opinion. They could have revamped Hangouts for Gsuite.