56
kappekp
5y

When will Google understand what an ecosystem means ?

Love it or hate it. What makes Apple devices homely is the ability to build a banded and consolidated associative user space that feels the same anytime on any platform. Crafting an ecosystem might be a daunting task , and requires adaptive and perfective rework through a long period. But it pays of , just like apples utility app suite does today. It was a journey to get it right.

Now we have Google , a company that is confused most of the time , releasing new apps everytime they have new feature in mind. According to me , Google did a phenomenal job in building hangouts and Allo , hangouts was a huge step forward from gChat , and Allo was way ahead of its time for a fun and innovative IM app. But what's the need for 2 different apps ? One has video calling , text messaging , group sharing , everything the Allo had.

Then all of a sudden you get Google Duo " The best ever video calling app " Why wasn't this integrated with hangouts and marketed the same way ?

Trial and error is one thing , this seems a lot like the lack of effort in architecting coaction and a well designed internetworking application framework. A lot of unnecessary choices have led to the shutting down of majority of their apps. Allo and hangouts included , but all this would have been unnecessary if the goal was to always build upon iteratively.

While I believe Allo was marketed as a cross platform chat application unlike hangouts , an integration plan could have always circumvented this issue.

I have to talk about another one of Google's failed efforts in recognition of potential , the hello app , but this rant has gone a bit too far already. So I'll post 6 hours later 😅

Well I'll always have the hope to see Google integrate the best of their ideas in a more relaxed and realised structure than what exists today. :)

Comments
  • 7
    These ppl also have a contacts app, god knows why, and 2 email clients for the same fucking gmail service. These companies are run by their money hungry management and sadly not by devs.
  • 2
    Recently I found an app called Google podcast on play store. Amazing app but unless Google integrates it with an app that people use like YouTube, it's a waste.
  • 5
    Trying many different things on one or two projects is not as easy as just building something new that's focused on what they wanna try out. They build fast and learn more each time. IMO it's one of the reasons why Apple is now playing catch-up with their software.
  • 1
  • 5
    Trust me. That was the plan back doors. To ship more backdoors
  • 0
  • 3
    @kunaldawn Actually you do have a point :)

    When Google started advertising Allo, (before release), they said that allo would integrate Signal's encryption algo (Axlotl) for messages by default. Quite some people got hyped and when it was released, they didn't give it a second thought and thought that every message was encrypted.

    Google removed the encryption (by default) for 'quality reasons' upon release.

    It's kinda the same how telegram works (except for that their encryption is insecure), they advertise it as an end to end encrypted/secure chat service but one has to enable the end to end encryption themselves; it's not on by default.
  • 1
    It’s actually much more simple than any of the previous comments. Google wanted to make its equivalent of FaceTime (Duo) and iMessage (Allo), in pursuit of creating an ecosystem. They weren’t meant to fully replace Hangouts because they had to keep that for enterprise users. Duo became successful because it was a really good cross-platform video chat. Allo failed because it didn’t have any advantage over other messaging apps like WhatsApp. Now they’re pushing Messages which is supposed to be an almost verbatim copy of iMessage, so that might actually work because it’s an extension of SMS messaging that’s already widely popular.
  • 1
    I see rational google bashing, I ++.
  • 0
    I'm no grammar Nazi but it really bothered me. It's "word, word", not "word , word".
    And about your rant, there's also the case of Google music that they want to fuse with Youtube music. But in that case, YouTube music sucks
  • 0
    Remember, a lot of the issue here for Google is that they have their hands tied (rightly so by the EU).

    As part of the string of anti-trust issues they’ve bumped into, the EU have required them to keep certain services more or less separate, as the EU are concerned that a fully integrated Google could be a dangerous thing.

    Of course, they tend not to listen so much, and anyone that thinks their photos and sheets and documents aren’t being used to drive advertising data are being naive, no matter how much google deny it.
  • 0
    They killed Inbox. I now have to use Outlook because the GMail client is just awfully obsolete!
  • 0
    Cuz hangouts was more for biz that for personal.
    Hangouts was about communicating, conferences, screen sharing, etc.

    They are phasing out hangouts. Btw.
    Chill.
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