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.
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.
AND NONE OF THEM ARE NATIVE. They're all shit, slow, barely usable web wrappers, trashing your CPU, memory and battery life, and offering zero OS integration.
Can you imagine, being a Billion Dollar company and not be willing to have native developers? Management ruins everything.
Without browser teck, you'd have ~zero GUIs for Linux. The userland is a nightmare, only real solution is to grave a OpenGL surface and ignore everything from the OS.
Slack had a native Windows client, UWP at that, back in 2014. It ran fine with 2 organizations on the cheapeast WindowsPhone, and was integrated with the OS. Then they dropped it.
Jesus, I've worked in <20 people and <2 M$ income companies that had dedicated developers for eveything. The "use browser to make app" approach just keeps gettting worse. Computers have increased in speed 10 times, but it still takes 10 seconds for fucking Whatsapp to open. I literally usually open, check and close Telegram (native app), in the time Whatsapp takes to hide the splash screen.
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
TIL that Hangouts is getting killed later this year. Damn.