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Comment by nix0n | Hacker News Reader

Let's talk about the alternatives to Hangouts:

Google's Android app has much better performance than Facebook's. (Particularly in terms of battery life. Not sure about iOS.)

IRC and XMPP are both a pain to set up. (I would love to be wrong about this. I'd run my own server if if you can find me dead-simple clients for enough platforms.)

SMS and MMS work well for phones but not for PCs.

AIM, MSN, and Yahoo, last I checked, work well for PCs but not phones. (Not sure if they still work well for PCs, pretty sure they haven't started working well for phones.)

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There are many XMPP free servers, and some clients are awesome. Like conversations.im.

Setting up a server is not terribly difficult though. I bet there are some simple container solutions.

It still requires you to setup an XMPP server and proper DNS for federation.

With hangouts, if someone has a google account, there isn't much else to setup which makes things much easier for non-technical friends & family.

Hangouts has other benefits:

- All users support the same call/video features

- Using GCM means that battery life is better than with long polling, in my experience

- Integration with Google Voice means you can add phone users to your video call

- Sending images is built in

- Single chat history that's synchronized[1]

- Works on Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and IOS with the standard clients[2]

I've setup an XMPP server before and it wasn't that hard. I have friends/family using Hangouts and Signal messenger. Hangouts provides a pretty smooth experience and is my generally preferred way to initiate a video call with my family who runs a variety of platforms (Andriod, iOS, Windows, macOS, etc)

[1] Of course this is possible because of Google being the hub with is the grandparent's concern

[2] XMPP also has this but some chat solutions are not as widely available. Of course the web app will work anywhere you can run a modern browser. I'm thinking of the official Chrome extension and I don't know if it works in BSD or other OS's.

conversations.im requires either entering your credit card into Google Play, or installing from F-Droid. That's already too much.

I'll set up the server, I'll put time and money into it, but it needs to be a one-step process to add each of my friends or it won't work.

The telegram desktop app works really well

Mumble is easy to set up and you can run a server on your WRT router, droplet etc. to share with others.

I mostly use Skype

Skype is pretty terrible software both in term of UX, resource usage and the political implications we all know about

Versus Hangouts? Skype and Hangouts seem to be on equal footing for UX issues and resource usage in my estimation. As for the "political implications", Google is also a big American company that has to play nice when one of America's three letter agencies knocks on the door, it's the exact same political implications and you are lying to yourself if you believe otherwise.

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