Not quite:

- Facebook Messenger combines all the functionality of Allo and Duo. - Whatsapp already has voice calling and is adding video soon (so I read on the internet) - iMessage and Facetime integrate in IOS much better than Google Duo does. In IOS, you go to a contact and press facetime. On Android, you go to a contact... then go back out to Duo and call them.

WeChat, of course, does everything that all these apps will ever do - as of many years ago.

I feel like ICQ 98 was the pinnacle of chat applications. Floating contacts and email style messages... brilliance.

The "find random chat partner" feature was so addictive!

> email style messages

Care to elaborate? I'm having trouble picturing what you mean. Long form with styling?

Strongly agree. It's still unsurpassed. And it worked well on systems with 64mb of RAM (maybe even less) without stomping all over the rest of the programs you were running. Seems like no-one can even "Hello World" a desktop app these days without a 100mb download and requiring several hundred MB of memory all to itself.

I was visiting China recently and started using WeChat... it really is far ahead of other messaging apps, the amount of integration with other services is staggering (many shops offer payment through the app, QR codes to link to WeChat are commonplace, even my hotel advertised its wifi settings through WeChat!)

I wonder if WeChat will try to push the service more outside of China?

you can call/message a person from contact page directly, I have done that with whatsapp

Duo competes with Facetime, except it's not integrated in Contacts and I can't imagine why. Duo and Facetime don't compete with Skype because they don't have the IM part which is a very important component of Skype. I used it for all these years as an IM client (business or friends), less as audio and rarely as video. But video is always the least used form of communication. Still I'd like to see some global usage stats of Skype: minutes by chat, voice, video. My customers, friends and I could be the outliers.

but hangouts lacks things which are useful for enterprises such as video recording (it's possible only if you make a "hangout on air", afaiu) and, in my experience, screen sharing text/code is painful because of the video encoding making it unreadable.

To me hangouts looks like a competitor to Skype only, at this time.

Hangouts on air is being replaced by Youtube Live

Except that Skype can be used for text chat like Allo.

And Apple doesn't really treat Facetime as an app.

> And Apple doesn't really treat Facetime as an app.

It's a separate app on the iPhone, no?