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.
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.