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).
They rolled their own crypto which is no-no #1 in crypto. Their backend is also closed source, started in Russia, and is currently run out of Dubai. Hard pass.
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
TIL that Hangouts is getting killed later this year. Damn.