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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

With all the lock-in and connectedness of Google owned systems, they cannot complain. And it's not Apple's fault that Google can't build long term successes in most products it creates. That's a management/strategy problem.

How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

Their shotgun approach works financially, but it means that only a few of their projects really stick (win). The rest just trundle along until they get discontinued.

The hypocricy is tiresome. When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.

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I don't disagree with you, but at the same time, who else is going to make this kind of noise? It's not like we can rely on the US DoJ to investigate these things and find solutions, despite all their noise about "policing big tech".

I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.

(It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.)

Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?)

As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.

I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform (insert xkcd here). SMS is the default, and iMessage is an elevation of SMS; in the same way FaceTime elevates it’s respective default (phone calls). If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. We have that. If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.

> yet another competing platform

People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps.

> If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app.

No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform.

You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives.

> If you want secure cross platform messaging

Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.

> messaging anti-competitive market

I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.

Even in all of Western Europe, WhatsApp clearly dominates, with iMessage coming in third or fourth in popularity in my practical experience (after Signal and lately, unfortunately, Telegram).

> I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform

I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.

> If iMessage was cross platform

It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install.

> If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.

That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography.

Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often).

Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match.

You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.

Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means)

They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.

Android allows you to choose the default messenger app, and setting up Signal this way gives you an experience very similar to the iMessage one on Apple devices - messages to non-Signal-using contacts go over SMS/MMS, messages to contacts with Signal go over the Signal protocol.

> They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.

Signal supports SMS on Android because Android has API for apps to actually interact with the underlying phone SMS capability (because Android is a platform customized by OEMs).

Apple does not have public API to interact with the hardware to send/receive SMS, although there's no limitation on using SMS in other apps.

There are two messaging limitations in the platform:

1. The sms: url scheme can only go to the built-in app. Since this does not let you pre-compose messages, I've actually never seen it used in production.

2. The MFMessageComposeViewController is used to overlay iMessage with your application to send a chat message. Generally I've only seen this used in lousy applications (admittedly including Twitter and various Google applications in that list) - the modern approach is to use the Share and Action sheet functionality, which presents first and third party apps via equal heuristics.

>I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.

The RCS Universal Profile is the first standardized version by the GSMA and came out in late 2016.

Google's RCS usage has primarily been via Google's own hosted implementations because of poor carrier adoption. Verizon AFAIK is planning to have RCS deployed this year.

Also AFAICT the e2e extension is not a standard but is Google-specific and currently exclusive to their Messages app. It also has several inferior technological, privacy, and UX impacts to other systems (such as only working for 1-to-1 chat, or requiring out-of-band verification code comparisons to guarantee the encryption isn't compromised).

It also is not a protocol evolution of SMS - its similarity is mostly that it like SMS was standardized through the GSMA. I also do not believe that the GSMA mandates its usage "instead of" SMS - it is meant to sit alongside SMS.

> That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property.

There's zero chance that RCS will replace Signal or WhatsApp or Telegram. It also won't replace SMS, at least this decade. It's just going to be Yet Another Option.

Google not opening up RCS to other applications is really annoying - I used to have a text messaging app I loved with TONS of customization and now I am basically forced to use googles damn messages app. It is the same shit as Apple is doing

Messaging platform for specific hardware platform is nonsense. Theoretically it shouldn't be widely used.

BlackBerry made a very success business doing exactly this for years.

RCS doesn't support E2E encryption out of the box.

So for me it seems like a far worse solution than the status quo.

I address this in my post: there's an extension, and there's nothing stopping Apple from implementing it, as Google has.

Any other features that are missing or sub-par in the RCS vs. iMessage equation is IMO trivial compared to the harm we have now of the lack of interoperability.

But if it's an extension to the spec then other client implementors don't have to support it. And then you end up with a lower common denominator effect where end to end encryption is no longer widely used.

That is by every definition worse than what we have today.

> But if it's an extension to the spec then other client implementors don't have to support it. And then you end up with a lower common denominator effect where end to end encryption is no longer widely used. That is by every definition worse than what we have today.

This is a pretty literal description of how iMessage interfaces with non-iPhones today though, so not worse.

It’s worse because people might actually use it. I currently use WhatsApp for my main contacts that are on Android.

How is that any worse than iMessage degrading to the lowest common denominator of SMS/MMS? And SMS/MMS is a much lower common denominator than RCS.

Look, I'm not asking for the perfect messaging system here. Because we're never going to get that. I just want something secure and private, and that works by default. Agreed that other client implementors don't have to support E2EE, but Google does, and Apple certainly would, and that covers enough cases right now to make me happy.

I'd grudgingly accept an iMessage app for Android, or (better) iMessage integration with the stock Android app. But I'd much prefer a standard that isn't controlled by a single company's goodwill... goodwill that they have already shown is in short supply.

Right now though there is no one standard which is a good thing for competition and security.

And you want instead to move the world towards a single, insecure standard, dictated by carriers who have decades long history of (a) supplying data to governments, (b) selling data to random third parties, (c) intercepting messages for their own nefarious purposes e.g. advertising and (d) doing very little to secure and protect their platforms from abuse.

No thanks.

> Right now though there is no one standard which is a good thing for competition and security.

There already is a standard, one which Apple falls-back to when messaging Android: SMS.

The would-be-dystopia you describe well in your second paragraph is not a hypothetical: that is the world as it is today with SMS; Apple could change that by switching to RCS + encryption extension and protect their users' privacy, but they won't because they view it as a competitive wedge (we know this due to the Epic lawsuit, as mentioned in TFA)

RCS e2e can be disabled by anyone with your phone number and technical ability/means to sim swap. There’s a public site to do this:

https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the implications, but isn’t the mechanism mentioned below the exact same thing for iMessage? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899880

If someone already has managed to swap/clone/steal my SIM, them being able to disable RCS on my number is pretty low on the list of problems I am going to care about.

I’m pointing out flaws with the implementations of both iMessage and RCS, not critiquing your own personal opsec.

Group RCS isn’t e2e, unlike iMessage. That’s the main point.

Other than RCS is tied to the 3/4/5G carrier networks and cant work over other media or physical protocols. It's more of the same bullshit layers on top of GSM instead of messaging being independent of the device.

iMessage is tied to your Apple ID, not your phone number or IMEI.

RCS is garbage. Here’s why:

There is a publicly-facing Google site to enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption.[0] This feature should only be configurable on-device, ideally, or at least be behind a login and 2fa. It’s just there on a public site. This is basically asking for sim-swapping attacks. And you’d never notice, only wonder why your RCS e2e keeps turning itself off. I wonder which individuals and agencies may benefit from that…

Even with the Chat features enabled, RCS doesn’t not support e2e on group texts[1], unlike iMessage, which does[2]. Google is just playing dirty pool and calling Apple users bullies by proxy, and I’m calling them on it.

Edit: Apple has a similar site to disable iMessage. This setting should only be available on-device, or if it has to have an online workaround, behind a login with 2fa. If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. The status quo benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies more than it improves the experience for end users IMO.

[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724

[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en

There’s a public site to disable iMessages too. Same exact design.

Apple do the same for [0] https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

It's interesting that both sites are very similar. Maybe Google copied Apple's site.

Seems like it. My points in that regard about only have this setting be accessible behind a login and 2fa is the way to go. You sold or otherwise deprived yourself of your iPhone and forgot to turn off iMessage? Contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. This functionality disproportionately benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies around the world.

You don't need to login also for Apple.

Why would an intelligence agency not be able to go to an Apple store or contact Apple support? This seems like it would only make things harder for users in good-faith scenarios without providing any real security benefit in others.

I was thinking more of in the field, just in time recon. Some things could be justified as imminent threat situations, at least after the fact.

As much as I detest RCS, those unenroll things are necessary for migration. Because it's for migration it can't be on device (you're migrating so you may no longer have a device).

I would guess that your devices will notify you if someone maliciously disables iMessage for you phone#, and maybe google does the same?

I think characterizing RCS as "garbage" because of the issue you describe is a bit of an overreaction.

Regardless, I don't see this as a big deal. The site will send a verification code to the phone before allowing anyone to disable it. If someone has cloned/swapped/stolen my SIM card and can intercept and use that verification code, then I have many many many more things to worry about before I worry about someone disabling RCS for my number.

But, as you point out in your edit, iMessage has the same issue. Potato, potahto.

> enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption

This is _really_ misleadingly worded. The website asks for a confirmation code, which you presumably need access to the device in order to obtain, right?

Sim swaps are a thing.

> If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store.

Requiring users to visit an Apple store to leave Apple's messaging ecosystem doesn't seem like an ideal solution, to put it lightly.

I think the status quo is actually not terrible, and with a simple modification (making any externally-triggered deactivation very visible on the logged-out device) it could be secure as well as being usable.

Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It strictly lowers the signal-noise ratio, makes merging the threads a pain, and users hate it.

You copied this one 4 times—that's egregious! No more, please.

I was replying in different threads, and I am far from the only users who uses an on-topic comment in this way. I’ll avoid doing that in the future. Just wanted you to know I didn’t invent this practice, nor am I the only one doing it on HN. I take your point, though.

Seems like you're only thinking of one piece of the puzzle, which your Android phone sending RCS thanks to a carrier allowing you to. Doesn't address this part of the problem:

> "Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in."

That's a fair point that I hadn't considered. I agree that's a negative, but for me, personally, I don't consider it a showstopper. I do get that other people might, though, and am understanding of that position.

On the flip side, most people using RCS would otherwise be using an @gmail.com address as their identity if that was how it worked. I'd say that's probably better than the carrier owning the identity, but it's still not ideal.

> Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in.

But, there is no "carrier lock-in" (at least not in the USA). In the USA, carriers are legally required to allow users to port numbers to and from any carrier thus creating competition rather than lock-in.

You can use iMessage with an Apple ID without having any phone numbers associated with it.

There's no carrier required at all with iMessage. With RCS you HAVE to have a carrier.

I'd rather be locked into a phone number than locked to apple though.

And with iMessage you need to have an Apple account, at least for carriers you have choices.

With iMessage, you must commit to doing business with one company as long as you use the service. That is vendor lock-in and is what Google is complaining about. With RCS, there is no one company that you must do business with to continue using they service.

That's the same with WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/others... unlike email which was distributed.

porting numbers is a royal PITA with some carriers. "legal" and "usable" are worlds apart, and the cost of screwing up a number port is potentially gigantic.

Porting numbers from one carrier to another is always possible (even it is "a royal PITA"). However, if I want to switch away from Apple, I will immediately lose the ability to use iMessage entirely. It is not just a PITA, it is completely impossible to switch providers when using iMessage.

Brave browser has the same problem on Android and iOS. Hopefully there will be some distribution deals in the future. But the default install is a huge problem for competition.

Ok, but the problem is group messaging. RCS doesn't support encrypted group chats. Given that the "ugh green bubble" peer pressure examples seem to mostly be in group chats, implementing RCS wouldn't solve anything.

But security is besides the point: Google doesn't want RCS support for security, it wants people not to know they're communicating with a non-apple device because they're afraid of the peer pressure.

Given that android has a huge marketshare lead, and google definitely knows how to make chat apps, they just never made one and stuck with it. Instead they kept continuously shipping new, incompatible, disconnected, chat apps and services. Because of that no one really trusts Google when it says "use this chat app, this time we'll keep it around". Meanwhile a person with a first gen iPhone or iPad (or a Mac from that era) can still use iMessage to talk to someone using the latest generation software. I would guess there's a loss of feature set, but it should theoretically still work.

Encrypted group chats are apparently coming soon.

https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1480663656463437824

It’s too late at this point: the vast majority of RCS clients won’t support it (if it happens), so the green bubble that google hates is destined to remain.

Google could have avoided this by not continuously releasing and killing chat services. If they’d stuck to one they would have a much bigger number of users - people complain about iOS, but lets be real: android is a much bigger market. Google allowing both the hardware and software to fragment in basic functionality is a questionable decision.

Yea - its frankly ridiculous at this point. The original Google Chat was great and was (as far as I know) their only offering at the time. Then it all went to hell.

And now we are back to Google Chat again!

> As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers.

What you want is for everyone to support whatever messaging protocol Google is pushing today. There have been a lot over the years and it seems like RCS won’t be the last (it has its flaws — serious, fatal ones, IMO).

Not to mention the nine year gap since they killed off support for an actual standard in all their products (XMPP).

Nearly a decade and a dozen failed messaging products later, now they are shaming others for not being interoperable with their preferred spec?

You bought a device and want every one else to make software for their devices to make your device work the way you want it to.

I don't think that's the way the world is.

> every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.

RCS wouldnt change that one bit.

Google doesn't even enable RCS with its own Voice product. It's worse than the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it's like the left thumb not knowing what the left pointer finger is doing. Google cannot deliver, then cry foul instead of even thinking to fix the organizational hell they've created.

The government should intervene to force interoperability and stop the lock-in that comes with any of the tech giants

> As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers.

I'd prefer the opposite: an OS with _no_ messaging app, and let users pick their own (both for Android and iOS). Expecting OS vendors to ship one out of the box is asking for a new IE-like scenario where whatever big tech companies pick becomes the standard, no matter how good or bad it may be.

I currently have 4 messaging apps on my phone, messaging is absolutely a competitive space. What you are upset about isn’t anti competitiveness, but fragmentation.

Messaging is easily a more competitive market than search.

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

> Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse

Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?

Hangouts was killed; I was actively forced to migrate my SMS stuff back to Google Voice, and Google Duo is what replaced it for video chat.

The 'internet chat' they introduced a different service called 'Chat' which runs in some consumer version of Google Workspaces.

I also really hate XML based chat, but the OG standard failed because the federated clients had a poor required minimum standard for interoperability and other stacks E.G. Microsoft's whatever version of it ... I actually forget offhand but it was something anti-competitive that also broke how useful it was outside of their particular implementation.

I did not use it and did not know anyone who did... glad to hear it did have some users after all.

> Google Duo is what replaced it for video chat

We were also supposed to get chat with Google Allo but they practically killed it before launch.

> Before launch, Google touted strong privacy in the app, with particular emphasis on messages stored "transiently and in non-identifiable form". However, at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google keeping logs of messages indefinitely (or until the user deletes messages) in an effort to improve the app's "smart reply" feature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo

Hah I was just linking another Ars Technica article on that theme:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901707

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time.

The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.

I still can't believe they had Hangouts doing IM, SMS/MMS via Google Voice, SMS/MMS locally, voice/video calls, groups, integration with previous Google Talk users, and integration into native Fi calling all from your choice of web page, browser extension, browser app, or mobile app... and decided the best way to move forward was to deprecate it and break it into half a dozen apps over 7 years to be left with only some features migrated into an enterprise slack clone that had to be fed back to normal users because all of the other one off apps failed.

One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???

I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.

Really makes no sense. Google Hangouts was by far their best product for all the reasons you stated, and kept me on the Android platform + Google Voice. When they started to break it up, I went to iOS and ported my number. Can't be bothered to deal with all that shit.

Hangouts was just a terrible marketing name - it was originally Google Chat ( and it did SMS as well) and they should have just stuck with that. I mean hell - we are BACK to google chat again now

> Hangouts was just a terrible marketing name

I still have a soft spot for Google Talk, that was such a simple name.

Totally forgot about Google Talk and I agree - great name. It seems like it was right around that time that Google shifted gears from simple and effective development to fragmented and lacking in interdepartmental communication.

Which is pretty ironic now that I think about it because were talking about apps they likely used internally for COMMUNICATION

>How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???

Seriously! Executives at Google surely must be aware of the memes by now. Are they so delusional they don't believe them? They don't care? When they chat with each other, which app do they use? Steve Yegg's platform rant still rings true: Google's dogfood is all snouts and hooves.

> How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???

They tried that. The person who was put in charge of the merged teams picked one and killed off all the other services without a migration path.

I just can't understand why Google has done what it has. They still could have reinvented messaging every year but they should have done it under the same name/app id so users would automatically get moved over to whatever the latest experience is. Rather than what they did which was introduce huge migration pain every time they redesign IM.

> When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.

I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?

> I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?

Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.

So pretty early in the curriculum then?

Bingo. Quarterly earnings per share rules all.

Yep, they replaced the Business Ethics course with this one covering advanced business administration tactics as everyone said the ethics class was incredibly not useful in today's world. /s

Why the /s? it seems ethics courses aren't even useful for knowing how to lie in front of the public any more. Businesses run their grift in the open now. I've literally not once in the last twenty years heard anything smart about ethics from a modern business leader; though PG flirts with ethical tangents once in a while.

Consider Peter Thiel. Musk. Bezos. These people think honesty is a weakness.

The reason for their shotgun approach is because Google is still too academia adjacent. Which is why a cash blow-up like DeepMind that publishes a Nature or a Science paper is the perfect Google company.

In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.

I wouldn't blame academia for that — this has looked exactly like the classic way companies founder once they get large enough that your ability to get rewarded is completely decoupled from actual business performance. Many businesses have the same dynamic you described where improving “someone else's” project doesn't help your career nearly as much as denigrating it and reinventing the wheel, hopefully round-ish.

At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.

I don’t even know what messaging service/app google uses NOW, and I use google and gmail every day

Google Chat, it actually loads on the sidebar of gmail unless you disable it... though I can't blame you for never noticing/caring.

We are going to need a full diagram to explain what the google chat app is. From what I remember it goes

Google Talk

Google Voice

Google Wave

Google Buzz

Google Hangouts

Allo / Duo

Hangouts Meet / Hangouts Chat

Google Meet / Google Chat

Currently there's

  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
  |          | Audio Calls | Messaging              | Video Calls |
  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
  | Consumer | Duo         | Messages (SMS/RCS),    | Duo         |
  |          |             | Hangouts               |             |
  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
  | Business | Voice       | Chat (Formerly         | Meet        |
  |          |             | Hangouts Chat), Voice  |             |
  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+

Business products are available for consumers too, but with limitations. (For example, consumers can't make bots for Chat.)

Hangouts is almost gone, starting a video call just makes a Meet and sends the link as a message, the messaging still works but has been folded into Chat (They interop for now at least.) so there's no reason to keep Hangouts on anymore really. Meet is for larger meetings, Duo is mostly for one-on-one calls but has group support now too. Chat is basically a Slack clone. Messages is Google's SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android and it requires an Android phone with an active phone plan but it has a web interface for composing messages on your computer. Voice does phone calls, voicemail, and SMS and MMS with a number from Google, and is separate from Messages. I don't think Voice can do RCS which is odd considering how their pushing it on Android.

That is one thing that I absolutely dislike -- sticking everything as a part of one big browser. I prefer individual apps that I can control separately, than use a monolithic application. :-(

You can, Chat has its own full page that loads when you click it from the apps menu and you can disable the sidebar in Gmail in the settings. The same was true of GTalk/Hangouts before Chat

I work for a Shopify company and we're a self-described "Google shop", meaning we use Gmail/docs/drive/meet but our messaging app is Slack. That shows you how much Google has failed with messaging.

My previous employer was UPS, a top to bottom Microsoft shop, and they were in the process of switching from Skype for Business (Lync) to Microsoft Teams when I left. Even Microsoft has done a better job with their messaging option.

I honestly prefer Google Worskpace's Chat to MS Teams by a mile. It's intuitive, the threading model is way better than Teams (which hides messages by default! Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?) and it integrates well with GSuite. In my org there are still holdouts who prefer using it over Slack.

I didn't know Google Workspace had chat until I read this comment, and we use Google Workspace.

I don’t know how you can miss it, it’s built into Gmail’s interface.

I haven't had to deal with the horror of the Gmail interface in decades and I can't even imagine a reason to bother trying.

Personally I like it better than Outlook.

I don’t have a choice anyway since my company disables IMAP/Exchange for security reasons.

I'd argue that while their current offering might be better (and I don't think it is), Microsoft has historically definitely done an even worse job than Google. And that's pretty difficult.

Around 2008, Microsoft had a huge advantage in messaging compared to whoever came next. MSN was widely used in much of the world, on every continent, and the product was far ahead of its time. Maybe not as dominant in the US, but the US has always been weird about messaging and still is. Video calls, group chats, chatbots for companies, they had everything. They were set up for success.

> In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month, placing it among the most widely used instant-messaging clients in the world

330 million, now that was a big number in 2009. Competition? Blackberry Messenger for a while, but that was never going to last with the lock-in. Facebook Messaging was getting popular but that too was (and is) very barebones.

What do they do with this golden egg? They kill it and force people over to.. Skype, an (especially at the time) poor piece of software with maybe 10% of the functionality that MSN had (which did audio/video calls just fine) and they wasted billions on acquiring. If they'd have kept developing it and made quality messaging apps for all mobile platforms, I don't see how Whatsapp would've stood a chance.

Google at least never was in that position. They were late to the game, only needing to start caring about messaging after buying Android and it becoming a success. Microsoft had 330 million people actively messaging in 2009! Did Hangouts even have 330 million active(!) users in 2020?

Teams is still stunningly poor. We use it at work and the Windows (hah, how's that for integration) version is so poor that a lot of us run it in the browser, where it runs marginally better. Images not loading, pasting a file or image not properly working, slow as molasses, far too limited settings to filter notifications.

>How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot.

“Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...

To be fair, Google was a champion of open standards for years and years, spending large amounts of time and money supporting them, before eventually capitulating to proprietary systems. Their enthusiasm for open standards is probably a major reason that they lost in messaging!

The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

Indeed they were open source proponents for a long time (and are far from that now), but the failure of their messaging platforms matches the failure of many, many of their other product (projects). They just do some periodic financial analysis and decide to cull the projects they don't see a big future in.

True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.

Products don't fail because Google cancels them, Google cancels them because they failed. There are of course lots of reasons that Google's messaging products have all failed, but I'm pretty sure that the use of open standards didn't help.

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

The article answers that:

"Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011."

I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.

It was a rhetorical question :)

What is it about Google's culture that creates this shotgun approach of halfhearted abandoned products? I have my own theories but I'd love to hear others.

Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions.

However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)

I mean I agree with you but the fact that iCloud does not provide a decent Api and OAuth makes it significantly worse in terms of lock in than Google.

The two companies have quite different world-views on the cloud.

Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports.

Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization.

Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api).

Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say.

RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS.

Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible.

Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.

I'm not a messaging historian, but according to Wikipedia RCS group was formed in 2007. Apple's iMessage was launched in 2011, which means it had been in development for some time.

Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard.

Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent".

(I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.)

But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.

Well Apple did kind of bet the farm by only including USB in the candy colored iMacs. It was a relatively new standard that no one was using, they shipped with only USB Ports and were ridiculed for it.

Oh yeah, for sure there are ulterior motives, no doubt. But just because one kid complains that their sibling has been hogging the Nintendo all day doesn't mean they shouldn't stop hogging the Nintendo.

It also doesn't mean they are hogging the Nintendo.

Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners.

So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line.

Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.

What lock-in?

There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want.

The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that.

As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...

"How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?"

At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

I was thinking the same thing. I've seen Google Voice (audio), Hangouts (text, audio, and video), Allo (text), Duo (video), Meet (video), Chat (text), and Messages (text) all in quick succession. Which one of these do I pick to compete with iMessage, Google?

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

many, but also, Gmail

And Apple should say Google search is too powerful.

Google search doesn't have lock-in through network effects, nor is it hard to change search engines. (Well it might be hard on mobile Safari, but that is actually Apple's fault.) If Apple wanted to build a better search engine for their users and the users of Android, they could do so easily.

Yes, Google's most popular service Google Search has no open API if you are willing to pay for it. Why they don't open it up so others can integrate?

What? It's a cross platform website, you can access it from any browser and any device. It's not like it only works on Google devices, chrome browser or ChromeOS.

It doesn't have an open API which would mean I could build a service that searches google and then takes those results and merges my own information and present that to the user on a website.

Apple does an awful lot of this as well, working to make things harder for businesses supported by ads and easier for walled gardens.

How many major walled guardians other than Apple are not supported by Adds?

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