• Zak@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    At the point they killed it, I do. It was an also-ran in the space with no strategy for growth. What I don’t understand is why they caved to pressure from carriers for an SMS-only app as mentioned in the article, or why they keep trying to launch new chat apps that offer no unique value proposition.

    • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It just doesn’t make sense, it worked almost identically to apples iMessage when the person was also on Android, integrated nicely with Google Voice, had a web interface and they could have just implemented RCS, instead they made allo/duo, killed those off and now we have messages, which is fine but is just sms and RCS… Just seemed like such a waste of effort to do all of that when you already had a working product with integrations already built out.

      • Zak@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Google is infamous for allowing valuable products to wither and die for no externally apparent reason. Hangouts, more than most was a major strategic error in my opinion.

        Of course if they hadn’t screwed it up third-party messaging options might be even less popular, and that would be unfortunate.