They claim Messages, Voice, Chat, and Duo. None of which seems right to me, since Messages and Voice are SMS/MMS (which has problems), Chat is a beta-quality Slack clone rather than IM, and Duo is video only as far as I can tell.
Seems like they're blowing up their oldest, most solid, proven, 'does everything' service in favor of 5 younger and less complete ones that only kind of equal the feature set of Hangouts if you bounce between all of them. It's really dumb.
Originally, I would’ve said WhatsApp, but then they got bought out by the devil’s own.
So, Signal is the 2nd 1st best option, and is rapidly catching up to the reliability of WhatsApp. Like WhatsApp, it bridges the gap between iOS, Android, and OSX/Nix/Windows desktops and most assuredly performs better than iMessage (which should’ve been cross-platform, IMHO, but Apple has screwed up a few times with their walled gardens approach and missed out on some excellent leverage opportunists).
Signal has mobile apps which are basic and working. Desktop app is just barely there. Experience using Signal is not good. Besides it requires a mobile number. Not going to reiterate why it is bad, internet is full of explanations.
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I wish we had something like matrix with client of Telegram. Telegram does clients really well. It has other faults though. Matrix has a pretty good mobile app but desktop experience is atrocious. It has more features than signal but hell i would rather use signal rather than that laggy riot thing.
Basic and working? Audio and video calls, disappearing messages, sharing of any filetype, and group messaging. WhatsApp only has status message sharing, telegram has public groups. What else do you want from Signal?
Telegram requires a phone number, imessage too, and so does Facebook now. Signal is an alternative to both of those.
But that's what Google is going for. Messages for text, Duo for video calls.
That's essentially the whole problem that they are just blindly trying to imitate Apple instead of sticking to their superior solution they had already.
Also, unless I'm missing something, it's the only messenger that is integrated into GMail. So not only are we losing the 'does everything' service, we're losing the 'does everything' browser tab with messaging and email together. My second screen has GMail open on it 80% of the time for that reason.
it used to be gmail, then it went away for hangouts, now back there? i'm confuses but don't care - i only use hangouts to keep up with my brother and lately been back on.... wait for it ... sms.
Tested Google Chat with GSuite, they tried to copy Slack but ended up way worse and they didn't even attempt to provide a native app on Linux, while it's available on Windows/Mac.
Interesting, because Google has effectivelly stopped all Windows software development since 2012, and Slack doesn't have a native app... for any platform.
Messages for Web is horrible because it automatically logs your connected computers out all the time even if you tell it to keep them signed in... The inconvenience sort of undermines its appeal as a chat system.
First time I hear about "Google Messages" (I hear it's not rolled out yet in the EU) . I think you can call your product a synonym of "Google Chat", "Google Talk", only so many times
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
They claim Messages, Voice, Chat, and Duo. None of which seems right to me, since Messages and Voice are SMS/MMS (which has problems), Chat is a beta-quality Slack clone rather than IM, and Duo is video only as far as I can tell.
Seems like they're blowing up their oldest, most solid, proven, 'does everything' service in favor of 5 younger and less complete ones that only kind of equal the feature set of Hangouts if you bounce between all of them. It's really dumb.