We can use it in the browser at work just by keeping Gmail open in a tab. No IM applications to install or concerns about whether we're running Windows, OSX, or whatever.

Then the conversations follow when you log off whatever desktop or laptop you're on via the mobile app. About half of us use Android so it either comes standard or you can easily install. The other half uses iOS and unlike iMessage/iChat/Facetime, you can easily use it on iOS as well as Android.

I installed Allo today but so far I haven't had a chance to try it out. Frankly it gives me the same mild annoyance I felt when Facebook broke messaging out into a separate app (and when I just said screw it and uninstalled both).

As much as I use and generally like Google stuff, they drive me nuts with their approach a lot of the time. When GChat/Talk became Hangouts and started integrating Voice and SMS/MMS, it seemed like a move in the right direction, both for them as a company (wanting to be your one stop shop for messaging) and for me as a user (less apps, more seamless integration). Then SMS/MMS was split back off into Messaging, Voice...I haven't really heard much about Voice in a while which is weird because it was one of those things that seemed so promising at one point. And now Duo alongside the pretty great video chat already in Hangouts and Allo alongside Messaging alongside Hangouts.

I get the idea of maybe starting a secondary platform/service/app to see what sticks and what doesn't. At worst they can integrate the good bits into their main product (see: Inbox). But their messaging strategy seems more like publishing Inbox with the intention of just ditching plain old Gmail.

I get the desire to start fresh, but that's a lot of established traction in a very crowded market to just throw away.

I was wondering that too. I honestly suspect some executive in Google's team wanted to have more visibility, team and power.

So...Google Buzz.

If they want something really innovative, bring back open standards and a federated IM protocol. We went from AIM/Yahoo/MSN to XMPP .. and back to Google/FB. It feels like a regression.

Edit: Oh and more recently Discord has taken over my friend group's urge to talk with voices.

"path\to\chrome\chrome.exe" --app=https://www.messenger.com

Edit: Actually testing that, that's actually pretty neat. I'm going to do that when I get home!

So why doesn't it get more love from Google?

UI? I write things, and they appear in front of someone else. Even my technophobe mom has no problems with it.

Tied to Google... well, yeah. But you kind of need some kind of 'account' for chat apps.

I remember when 'Whatsapp' came out and people mentioned that it didn't have a web interface. I won't use anything that I can't type into when I'm at a computer - pulling out my phone and t-y-p-i-n-g out a message is just a non-starter.

The UI lags hard for me during common operations, such as opening the app, and sending messages; often there's a several second lag between pressing the send button, the entry field blanking, and the message finally showing up in the conversation w/ UI indicating that it's in the process of being sent.

And occasionally, yes, I out-type the app & phone's ability to process keyboard input. My phone is a bit old, but that seems like an excuse more than anything; I don't really understand why it's so hard for a device w/ a processor that measures its speed in GHz and RAM measured in GB to keep up with a single app whose job is to send text messages.

But alas, the phone world's opinion is that I should upgrade to the latest and greatest $400-$600 phone every 18 months.

Not only that, but when I've explained these issues to my friends they respond with the same response you gave, down to the 'weird.'

And the name is stupid. When I used to encourage people to use Hangouts, I always had to explain the name. Talk is a great name and they should have gone back to it for Allo.

  > why isn't Allo just Hangouts 3

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/22/emus-android-texting-app-m... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/google-acquires-emu-an-im-...

While I agree with first two, Hangouts was a terrible brand with a bad rep on UX (too slow on Android, complex UI etc), it was kind of like Google's Internet Explorer. They had to get rid of the brand for consumers at least especially younger ones that are the prime target (the Snapchat generation if I may say). I agree though that Hangouts has a better reputation with the corporate world even though Slack is kind of eating their lunch minus the video part where they're still king I think.

These 2 new apps are destined to fail

I still use hangouts cause it's linked with Gmail ... but I hate it cause it's slow and unreliable

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focu...

One possible explanation: internally Google eats their own dog food. When I was a contractor there, everything ran on gmail, gooogle docs, and hangouts. Perhaps they wanted something better for internal use, and now we get to use it also?

The same reason Duo isn't.

Both are substantial departures from what Hangouts was, with some overlap, and calling either Hangouts would create incorrect expectations.

From what I've read Allo will become the casual messaging app, and Hangouts for work. Google probably wants to compete with Slack and similar offers.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point Google allows Allo and Hangouts to communicate.

It took Google forever to update it to match the iOS 7 "flat" look. And to this day it's missing a pretty obvious feature: search! Yes, there is no search functionality in the Google Voice app on iPhone. Apple's Messages and Facebook Messenger both have it.

There's also https://hangouts.google.com/

I chat via messenger a lot more than I check my newsfeed, and when I check my newsfeed I don't care about messages. Perfect split for me at least :)

Now, if someone uses Facebook Messenger to send me a message, my Facebook app will notify me about unread messages - I've disabled most notifications, but the icon still gets a number increase indicating messages that can be read. These messages cannot be read from within the app without installing Messenger. Using the browser no longer work for reading these messages, since they are pushing the Messenger app.

The only sad part here are the few "friends" that actually write their messages to /dev/null trying to reach me...

I've been contemplating disabling my FB account altogether, but it turns out it is required sometimes for authentication. Spotify being an important one for me.

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security&section=sessi...

Well, using the browser works, but you have to use "Request desktop page".

Ditto. Works for me, too. I use FB.com to see messages on mobile Safari.

The only reason I don't use FB.com for everything is cause FB app allows me to upload video (but since I can't seem to get video posted to FB, via my iPhone 5C, to come out nicely, I'm going to delete the app too).

You can use "request desktop site" on messenger.com (and probably also facebook.com), or use mbasic.facebook.com to get messages without the messenger app.

If you force the desktop version of the page it works, but is awkward. Instead I use a web wrapper that has some other nice features, like showing me my messages with formatting that scales well to my phone's screen size

For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me.

My wife also had three account entities for the same name in the Google system and sometimes her reply would get sent to a new chat. So about once a week my history with her would start fresh.

However, I agree that hangouts has been my preferred chat application for a long time and I'm disappointed how hard it is to get into the siloed worlds that a lot of chat apps have these days.

I had something similar to this happen a year or two ago. Messaged not showing up, or silently showing up later, and generally from one or two people of those I used hangouts with. In my case it was either a separate app that still thought it was the default SMS application (so Messages was default for SMS, but Hangouts was still set up to be integrated with SMS, or possibly it went weird if Messages was running even if Hangouts was the default SMS app), and once I disabled the old app, I got much more consistent behavior.

Hangouts itself was supposed to be the "look at all the stuff we can do if we abandon XMPP" rewrite. And it's only three years old. How can they need to do it again?

That's exactly why I don't use browser-only IM clients. I don't want to keep open a full-fledged browser only to stay online when something much less would be sufficient. Ideally, a IM should offer a broad list of solutions: web-based, desktop native clients, mobile apps, and whatever else one might think about. One size fits all is only a sure way to self limit the adoption of your IM solution.

I didn't want a second app running at all times in the background when my goal was to minimize Facebook usage when possible.

Now I have to jump through hoops to check messages every once in a while on my phone because they make it so they won't show up on mobile unless you install their secondary app or switch to a desktop user agent.

So now I just check messages once or twice a week on desktop and use their service even less often.

Once they add a Windows or Linux client I'll give Allo a try.

To me it's a bit distracting to abruptly interrupt a coding session and pull out my phone. Lately I've been trying to minimize distractions and stay in a terminal or development IDE as much as possible. I mentally view distractions similar to latency when accessing memory, something like:

  Look up info in terminal or IDE - comments within code, man pages, etc. <===> register access
  Desktop applications - PDF, Powerpoint slides, IM, etc.                 <===> L1 cache hit
  Google something (often results in reading articles, HN!, etc.)         <===> L2 cache hit
  Phone usage (apps, calls, etc.)                                         <===> Memory access
  In person chat (prone to rants/complaining, tangents, etc.)             <===> Disk access
  Meetings                                                                <===> Tape based storage :)

    Google something (often results in reading unrelated articles, "link dives", etc.)  <=====> Cache miss (?)

    bogg 120 # consumed 120 calories
    bogg -120 biking # exercised 120 calories while biking

Once the command line portion is finished I plan to do a Show HN and hopefully people start using it.

Instead, it seems to be preferred that you simply upvote the comment instead of replying.

My point is my strange use-case (an annotated map) was an artifact I could assemble at a desktop from pre-existing bits I already had to hand, but with (current) mobile so many degrees of freedom are removed. Unless someone has (1) identified a mass need exactly the same as yours, and (2) made an app that does exactly that you are out of luck.

So true. And even if there was the need, and the app was made, you would never be able to find it in the app store without knowing it's exact name.

While this may be particularly true of mobile right now, I feel the above statement is, and has always been, true of software in general.

It's still early days for mobile, despite the amazing capability that's already there. It will get there eventually.

Mobile has replaced a lot of the way people spend time but for my interest and needs desktop is king. I don't watch movies on my desktop (YouTube yes) but I also don't do video editing and data science on a phone.

I couldn't go back for anything. I simply couldn't. I have a fairly light and portable laptop with a 13" screen that I carry around from time to time, and it's a vastly more constrained computing experience.

Also, with the growing trend of 'cord-cutting' i think more and more people are hooking their laptops up to their TVs and watching netflix and youtube that way. Though the trend in that space seems to be pointing more toward curated ecosystems like roku, apple tv, etc.

But i think eventually for pretty much anything else the hardware and software will reach a point where you can dock your phone into some cradle and that will be your desktop environment also - this has been tried and failed many times, but its usually because the performance just isnt there to be competitive with real computers.

I have been doing this for some time now. My laptop hooked up to my TV serves me for gaming (helps that a lot of PC games support controllers now), consuming content and music all without being crippled by consumer hardware restrictions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12545596

[1] https://www.techinasia.com/googles-reach-billion-users

Another thing I find annoying is we went from mobile first to mobile only for a lot of things. The point of mobile first was to ensure that the less capable devices were not second rate citizens to desktop. Not that they are the only thing customers will use to access services.

For the tasks we do >50% of the time, maybe. But no way it's better for >50% of the tasks.

On that topic, when is the inbox app replacing the gmail app?

Maybe never and that's good, given that sometimes I cannot download attachments with the inbox app that I can happily download from the old gmail app right away.

Too bad they killed SMS history combining.

In Google's thinking, the whole IT stack is Google cloud-based, and in the long term, people having "different desktop devices" isn't the right way to go.

Yes, this is overstatement for sarcastic effect, but the trend seems to be real....

From articles/reviews of the app from official publications, Google is saying a Desktop app is in the works, it's just not ready yet.

There are already good text messaging apps. For a general messaging solution, I don't want something tied down exclusively to my phone. If the emphasis is on photo sharing (e.g., Snapchat), then that can still make sense. But if the emphasis is just on text, then I want to be able to use a desktop or web app whenever I'm using a laptop or desktop. Not being able to do so is honestly a dealbreaker for me.

I love Google Music but there is no desktop client for it and without a desktop client integration with hardware keys or caching/downloading/syncing music like spotify or iTunes is impossible.

It's the same story with Google Photos. I love it but they decided to shutdown picasa web albums and I don't think they'd ever build a desktop client.

Google operates differently from the rest. It's not for people like us who use a desktop/laptop.

This is why open protocols exist, ffs...

Of course now that Facebook owns Whatsapp and has decided (again) to show users what fools they where and who is the boss, all the more reasons to promote Telegram, matrix, irc etc ;-)

My hands are big, and I've always hated writing on phones. On my computer I can blast away messages on my glorious mechanical keyboard.

Hopefully we'll see chat sync, SMS support, Google Voice support, Desktop App in the pipeline.

Messenger - if you're referring to the Android app - was just an SMS app from the start and nobody expected anything more from it

I'm sitting here all day long at work. I do not like reaching for my phone and typing long messages on there.

I have also started using Wire for the same reason, and even better, since it offers end-to-end encryption by default.

WhatsApp does not run on tablets... period.