> Merged conversations are a feature that's immensely useful for users

Google's own information on customer response and usage disagrees: "Merged conversations used to let you see your Hangouts messages and text messages in the same conversation. We have decided to remove it, because it caused user confusion and had low usage." [0]

[0] https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/6005073?hl=en

Unsurprising that it "caused user confusion" since unlike with imessage, SMS messages were not synced with the hangouts desktop client so chunks of a merged conversation when viewed on the phone would be missing when viewed from the desktop. If conversations are to be merged, they need to look the same everywhere. The half-assed implementation that hangouts used is worse than not merging them at all.

As someone who uses Google Voice, my SMS messages are synced with the desktop client. This is a significant loss of functionality for me.

This feature was valuable with iMessage before Apple added that synchronization, and frankly I bet in the grand scheme of things the vast majority of people using these features on both iOS and Android do not ever try to use a desktop to manage these messages (and in the case of Android probably don't even know that's possible, as at least with iOS if you have a recent version of Mac OS X you are highly likely to discover the feature by accident).

I wonder about that, given that Hangouts is directly embedded in GMail. There might be quite a few more people who use Hangouts on the desktop.

They're free to disagree; ostensibly they may have telemetry on it. But it was a feature the user could opt into if they so chose (if I recall, it was in fact opt-in [1]) and now they no longer have that choice.

[1] http://www.greenbot.com/article/2971862/android-apps/how-to-...

Well, yes, obviously it was a feature that existed and could theoretically be used -- that's not in dispute anywhere; there's a pretty big gap between that and being a feature that was, in practice, actually useful.

I think this is taking it to the next level, even for Google.

They now make hangouts be on parity with Allo, except for no opt-in end-to-end encryption? Or is the difference that Allo allows encryption, and Hangouts allow group video chat?

BTW, I know I've used videochat via hangouts on Android some time in the past two years - but I guess maybe that was through chrome?

The good news is that there's some work on the open XMPP side, with conversations[1] (along with the OMEMO protocol [2]) and zom.im [3] -- so it looks like we're set for another xmpp revolution. And if that fails, there's always Matrix[4] (And the best part of that is that it's not either/or - we can have both. And everyone else can rot in their crummy message silos. Good riddance).

[1] https://github.com/siacs/Conversations

[2] https://conversations.im/omemo/

[3] https://github.com/zom/zom-android

[4] https://matrix.org/

> Make two of everything, then kill one a few years later, and make another.

This may be a consequence of their sometimes-reported strategy of having two separate internal teams, as a way to try and get the benefits of competition within their company. But I agree, it leads to a mess that could be handled a lot better.

Google apps are weird. I get the sneaking feeling they just make so much money they don't give a damn about usage, and just build the way they want to- which, apparently, leads to killing apps.