this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
190 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
59111 readers
4783 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The golden opportunity was when Hangouts was the default SMS app on Android. The same technique has been very successful for Apple.
I still can't understand why they killed hangouts
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.
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.
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.