What you see as throwing shit at the wall, looks like testing market hypothesis to me.
Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.
Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.
Google has been working on chat for well over a decade. At what point do they stop "testing market hypothesis" and build the product people want to use?
I don't want to be a Google tester (market or beta), and certainly not for years on end. I don't care about "opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on". Just build one good chat system.
In the areas where Google excels, they didn't get there by applying this throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy. The design of Google Search wasn't the result of 13 years of betas. What do you do when nothing sticks?
If they can stumble around for this long and still feel the need to test half a dozen possible strategies, maybe the correct conclusion is that, unlike Search or Maps, Google doesn't really have anything as a company to offer this product category, and they should just get out and focus on areas where they can contribute.
It seems like Duo is working out. It has more than 500m installs, and isn't installed by default, so it's numbers aren't padded the same way Hangouts' are.
Allo, despite being shut down got to about the same size as Signal.
Is hangouts installed by default (i don't know), seem to have a billion installs, which looked a bit too high for both default-install, and non-default install.
It's installed by default on most Android devices, and a large portion of Asia's handset market (India) is dominated by Android, but messaging in India is dominated by Whatsapp. So almost-a-billion is bloated download numbers of Indian smartphones coming with hangouts installed, but none of them using it.
Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.
Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.