There are two things that keep my wife and me tethered to Google Chat as our primary means of texting each other:
1) Search. This is the big one. The fact that I don't even need to differentiate between email and chat when I need to search for something is highly valuable. Plus, its search functionality is just in general very solid. Go figure.
2) Integration into GMail. During the workday, it's more convenient for me to text from my laptop than from my phone. During the evenings, it's often the reverse. The fact that I can easily have a conversation going in my browser, then easily transition the conversation to my phone, is quite useful.
That said, I would love to be convinced that some of the alternatives mentioned in the article can either match or make up for these key features.
I went all in on Google Hangouts back around 2010, and made everyone close to me switch. Ten years and ten Google messaging apps later, when Hangouts sunset "officially for real", I let my contacts choose what protocol we used. I mostly just use Discord now (with some Signal for techie friends).
Google was perfectly poised to be at least the second biggest player in the messaging space, and they squandered their lead over and over.
I refuse to trust Google to sustain a product that isn't their core focus again unless they make some major changes how they treat the product lifecycle.
>Search.
...broke when they switched, by the way, so now you need to manually search in a different place for any older message.
to be fair, Google+ really messed them up here. Everything went to crap after Plus was attempted. I say this because Hangouts got swallowed by and subsequently neutered after Plus.
I didn't talk much about Google Chat in the article, but I think it's a fine example of a non-E2EE messenger in the same bucket as Telegram, from a company that tends to demonstrate a better-than-average respect for user data (with the disclosure that I worked there at one point).
If you're using it and liking it, I personally wouldn't recommend switching. I didn't recommend it because at this point I don't trust Google to continue investing in it given multiple incarnations of Hangouts, prior Chat products, Allo, etc.
1) Search. This is the big one. The fact that I don't even need to differentiate between email and chat when I need to search for something is highly valuable. Plus, its search functionality is just in general very solid. Go figure.
2) Integration into GMail. During the workday, it's more convenient for me to text from my laptop than from my phone. During the evenings, it's often the reverse. The fact that I can easily have a conversation going in my browser, then easily transition the conversation to my phone, is quite useful.
That said, I would love to be convinced that some of the alternatives mentioned in the article can either match or make up for these key features.