
Google discontinues support for hangouts API - hueving
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/01/09/google-quietly-discontinues-support-hangouts-api/
======
franze
2054 days ago I wrote this: Why should anyone ever use a Google API ever
again? [http://googlecode.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/spring-cleaning-
for...](http://googlecode.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-
our-apis.html?showComment=1306481143396&m=1#c3564212561169948866)

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592399)

~~~
VikingCoder
Why should you ever use any high-level API ever again? High level APIs tend to
change.

It's because they add value right now that would be hard to add in any other
way.

~~~
patmcguire
Yeah, but there's the Stripe kind you can sort of rely on to be there, and
then there's the kind that is basically guaranteed to go away.

~~~
VikingCoder
I disagree with your fundamental premise. Companies go out of business all the
time.

------
Navarr
> we will be retiring the Google+ Hangouts API that enables developers to
> build apps for the older version of Hangouts video calls.

There's a lot of confusion (because Hangouts != Hangouts) about this closure,
but this line from their FAQ sums it up pretty well.

------
talideon
This is why I see no sense in even bothering with Google's IM offerings.

Is there any other company that's gone through quite as many IM offerings as
they have?

~~~
apozem
Google's decisions on messaging have baffled me for years. Why get rid of
gChat, a popular and useful service? Why not implement flawless SMS
integration into Hangouts (send SMS from desktop) for people not on Google
Voice? Why ditch Hangouts for Allo? Why would they think searching is
something regular users would want in a messenger?

Why?

~~~
talideon
I think, though I have no way to confirm this, that it's down to internal
siloing: gChat was there doing its thing, and meanwhile somebody was
experimenting with Hangouts because they either couldn't or didn't want to
deal with the gChat team. They produced their shiny object, and then gChat,
which wasn't exactly ever given much love in the first place, was further
marginalised and finally had its XMPP bridge killed in the face.

Then Hangouts turned out to be a total mess, but by then they were committed
to it. Meanwhile, somebody else was messing with AI internally decided to turn
what they had in to a proper chat app, giving us Allo. I suspect Duo started
as a way to rescue the video parts of Hangouts with WebRTC support, but that's
all speculation.

Edit: oh, and let's not forget Google's Spaces too! Seriously, Google need
some joined up thinking when is comes to messaging.

~~~
dilap
So, basically, no leadership at Google.

The funny thing is gChat was well-loved. They had a great starting point!

Then they killed it and made a bunch of shit nobody wanted.

~~~
asciimike
People say that Google has a "Darwinian" product development process, where
they pitch products against each other and only the "strong" products survive.

I think most of the product fragmentation/churn at Google comes from four
things:

    
    
      1. Googlers need to "explore all the possibilities their minds have to offer" (direct quote from a coworker)
      2. Managers (both engineering and product) generally won't tell you "no"
      3. Internal consensus building burns people out
      4. The promotion process is based shipping things that demonstrate growth
    

Google hires lots of very smart, very creative engineers, and asking them to
["maintain legacy code", "answer support questions", "deal with rot but
important tasks"] is a tough sell. Many of those people could easily go
anywhere else and do whatever they want (this is the talent most companies are
trying to hire for), and managers realize this.

Since managers don't want to lose talent, they kinda let engineers do whatever
they want, within a given field. The way managers tell you "no" is by not
funding/staffing your product/feature--shifting resources to something else.
I've very rarely been told an outright, "no, we won't build that" and am more
often faced with "that's an interesting idea, let's investigate that more"
only to not have sufficient headcount to "investigate that possibility" by
building a PoC, etc.

I assume there probably were efforts to "upgrade" Hangouts to have AI
integration and a more modern mobile interface vs replace it with Allo. I
assume there was a roving band of 10-20 engineers who were in between projects
and thought "wouldn't be be great if...", prototyped Allo together on Hangouts
infra, and then went to the Hangouts team and said, "hey, we built this cool
thing, let's integrate and Make Hangouts Great Again™!"

I assume this was met with initial enthusiasm, until people started digging in
to the cost of maintaining the "legacy" Hangouts infrastructure and supporting
all the new features asked of them. There were also probably product
differences like "Allo wants to log you in via phone #, Hangouts is Google
usernames" that slowly became irreconcilable. Resources shifted, and the
roving band of engineers probably said, "We'll build our own Hangouts, with
phone numbers and chat bots. In fact, forget the Hangouts." [1]

Along similar lines, the path to promotion while building a new product is far
more clear than upgrading/maintaining a legacy product. It's faster to build,
easier to show growth, and probably "more fun."

I think it's not so much "no leadership" at Google, just an engineering driven
culture with a different set of incentives. Instead of "Darwinian" I think
Google has a "probabilistic" product development process: Keep smart engineers
happy/engaged, there's a reasonable probability they will eventually create
10x products, since 10x products are better for users/developers/Google than
2x products, it's better for Google to have churn on 2x products than not have
10x products, even if that churn burns users/developers.

The main problem is that while 10x products can offer breaking changes, it's
generally not reasonably for 2x products to do so. I think many things that
are originally intended as incremental changes are touted as 10x improvements
to get around having to maintain interoperability (which implies maintaining
legacy stacks), but result in a poor user/developer experience. I just think
too few of the things touted as 10x improvements actually are, leading to,
"deprecations of the old product before the new product is ready."

(Disclosure: I work @ Google but not on any comms products, these are my
opinions and not necessarily those of Google)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35AQK014tI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35AQK014tI)

~~~
talideon
That is surprisingly close to what I'd expected.

I'd heard talk from one of the devs maintaining Hangouts for Android that
there was a lot of technical debt in the project, which is part of the reason
progress on improving it had slowed down to a crawl.

I guess my main problem is that the protocols are being tossed away and the
continual rebranding. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence, even if the
underlying tech is solid. It's one thing to have that probabilistic
development going on underneath the surface, but once it bubbles up to a
certain level, somebody has to have their eyes on the big picture, and there's
little evidence of that, at least as far as messaging goes. I think that's
what's missing here.

------
BugsJustFindMe
Real world but maybe slightly noobish question here...

When Google shuts down an API, how much of it is actually shut down?

For example: I know they said they shut down the free Translation API back in
2011. If you go to their website they go on and on about how you have to pay
for every use now...except...with a very simple query I can still throw
requests through a Google server for free translations without any API key. So
it's obviously not actually shut down.

So when an API shuts down, is it actually shut down or does it keep on living
just in secret hoping nobody notices? Is Translate a secret but maybe not so
secret exception?

~~~
dadoprso
My guess is there are no guarantees. No support. You may get a response you
may not. Your request may take 2 ms or 20000 ms. The service may get
overloaded, etc.

------
mikecb
Well, there's currently an invite only preview of a totally new experience,
and it's focused on enterprise users, and no one really used this API, so
what's the big deal?

~~~
squidc
Really? Where can I learn more about this?

~~~
mikecb
[https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/09/new-early-
adopt...](https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/09/new-early-adopter-
programs-team-drives.html)

Below the team drive one.

------
leni536
Goodbye purple-hangouts [1] (it still works though I guess until April 25).

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-
hangouts](https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts)

~~~
ominous
Hm, actually: [https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-
hangouts/issues/114/go...](https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-
hangouts/issues/114/google-drops-the-google-hangouts-api)

------
euyyn
lol quietly? The blog post was front page here and in /r/programming.

~~~
sametmax
"quietly" from google.

------
thw9871
Is this what they used to break their XMPP support ? I used to be able to chat
with Google contacts without logging into Google, but that doesn't work
anymore unless the other party is using XMPP with a 3rd party client (which is
nobody).

------
20years
I was recently comparing the hangouts API to the join.me API for a project I
was working on. I chose join.me mostly because I have been burned too many
times by Google shutting down API's.

Advice: don't use Google API's for any business related stuff that you
anticipate sticking around for awhile.

------
pmontra
Good luck with Duo. I had 9 contacts using it in August, that is, 9 contacts
that installed it. I made two test calls and that's it. 15 contacts a couple
of days ago, no more calls since August. I uninstalled it because I don't like
to leave unused apps around.

~~~
dx034
I use it as it's the only cross OS app that supports Wifi to phone network
switching in a call (others end the call when you lose connection), but I
really don't like it. It's exactly as it was when they published it. iOS
supports call screens for other apps since a while now (which whatsapp uses),
Duo calls still only come as a notification. And they also sometimes fail if
the other person hasn't used the app for a few days.

I really liked the concept of the app, and the quality is certainly at least
on par with other apps. But I have the strong feeling that it won't be around
for long.

Let's hope Whatsapp supports network switching soon so that I can get rid of
Duo.

~~~
pmontra
The question with Whatsapp is if Facebook is trying to cannibalize it into
Messenger. They insist not supporting bots and if bots become big Whatsapp
will be losing ground against everybody else. I'm puzzled by their strategy
considering that FB is putting a lot of effort in supporting bots in
Messenger. They could just use the same backend API and a passably similar UI
in the app.

~~~
traek
From what I've heard, the WhatsApp team has remained fairly independent
internally. They're executing on a strategy separate from Messenger's.

------
camus2
And then Google expects me to use paid lock-in services on Gcloud? I'll go
with inferior but open-techs like XMPP, no thanks.

~~~
fixermark
Generally, Google's paid offerings stick around a lot longer, since there's
money attached.

------
andrewclunn
Google abandoning a platform or dropping support for an API is hardly even
news. They do this constantly. It's a hard lesson we developers should always
keep in mind when selecting a platform, language, or toolkit.

~~~
xg15
But what consequences would you draw from that lesson?

~~~
andrewclunn
Learn Rust instead of Go. Choose React over Angular.

~~~
ghotli
Meh. Those technologies are poor examples of your point, imo.

~~~
andrewclunn
The Angular 1 / 2 situation is a great example. The Rust over Go is some
advice based on the lesson learned.

------
therealmarv
I recognized that quality was a little bit better on Duo with really bad
network (50-200Kbit/s). I hope they do not forget to optimize Hangouts in
parallel to Duo.

~~~
ReverseCold
Unfortunately it looks like they don't really care about hangouts. It's pretty
much the same thing from when it launched, except slower.

~~~
dragonwriter
Hangouts is being pivoted to be an enterprise messenger (which is why the API
allowing building apps for the old, consimer-focussed Hangouts is being
discontinued.)

------
ZeroGravitas
Totally meta comment but I'm kind of tired of "quietly" in headlines to add a
surreptitious air to something. Almost as bad as "finally" added to make
everything seem like it's arrived years too late. Is it simply impossible for
people to run a news site without blatantly pushing people's buttons?

~~~
sametmax
In that case the "quietly" is important, because the article explains that
there was no official shout out of this from Google. They just updated their
FAQ.

Breaking peoples product is bad enough, but not taking the time to make a
clean announcement such as on their official blog seems unprofessional to me.
Hence the "quietly".

~~~
SlashmanX
> They just updated their FAQ

FTA:

> the notice came in the form of an updated Frequently Asked Questions page
> outlining the termination, and an email to developers active on the
> platform.

Any developers using the API in their product would've received an email.

