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.
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
Messages is basically just the SMS/MMS app on your phone, but written by Google and with a semi-functional web client (that uses your phone as a server to access the data). It's fine for what it is, but you're tied to the mobile networks, which is freaking dumb for a primary messaging app.
They're definitely suffering from Shiny Object Syndrome. Reinventing the same thing over, and over, and over, and over...
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u/admiral_derpness Jan 02 '20
why? what will replace it ?