Google trying to play the "it's bad for teenagers under peer pressure" card against Apple on this is lower quality than their usual propaganda, where they make fun of Apple for doing something six months before they do it too.
This is the company that convinced people that "open" was a feature, a walled garden was bad because you could do less but in reality has never offered anything other than a lower cost proposition.
>It is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015.
100%.
Google Chat is an absolute shitshow, they replaced the quite mature Hangouts with this junk which still has glaring, obvious bugs everywhere.
All those smart people who must have worked on it, they must have some ridiculous structural inefficiencies inside Google to think that is worthy of shipping. It's hot garbage.
