It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done. Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. /rant
I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?
Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc.
If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists.
Edited: to use more polite tone.
The vast majority of communication happens on products that: 1. Don't even have a desktop component 2. Have no "status" indication (oh noes!!!) 3. Are completely closed ecosystems
And yet you never see posts about how WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, etc are horrible because of the above reasons.
Communication in general, business communication still is very much dominated by desktop software (e.g. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-lync-video-confe...)
If you're still thinking of gchat as a desktop AOL Instant Messenger replacement then I can see that products that seem to operate that way are disappearing. The way people are using chat products is changing drastically due to mobile. I would say AOL-style chat isn't going away because Google killed the competition -- rather I think demand for those style systems is just dwindling in favor of multi-platform, multi-modality, multi-party chat clients (picture/text/video, desktop/tablet/mobile).
I agree that classic desktop IM apps have changed anyway, except in the enterprise world (where MS and IBM still ship horrible, horrible stuff).
I've had a conversation on my phone, only to go home and flip on my computer and see those messages finally get sent a good 90 minutes later.
It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.
I use it every day and don't think i get anything like this issue (for balance)
Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore.
So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.
They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.
Can someone tell me what the green underline beneath an avatar meant then?
I wonder if the bug is related to these changes.
(My brain short-circuited there for a moment when trying to form a reply to a comment that was both extremely sarcastic and ludicrously wrong. Hopefully the above meets all our expectations.)
And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' (it's a design decision on their end), but more the general experience of using hangouts.
As far as I can tell you're still not able to mute the new message sound, without turning off notifications all together (hangouts in Gmail). Chatter picking up in a hangout and you want to mute it for a while? Again, not possible. Turn off all notifications for that hangout and chances are you'll completely forget you were ever part of that conversation (snoozing notifications hangouts-wide makes sure you miss all other personal messages sent to you as well).
Uploading a photo on a slow network is a pretty terrible experience: it'll start telling you the upload has failed and it's retrying (no progress to be seen anywhere). If you delete the message and try again, you'll probably end up with two of the same messages in your conversation, because often it doesn't appear to correctly 'receive' your deletion request either.
When you've received a photo that you need to save to your gallery (maybe you want to zoom-in a little, or share it with someone else?), be prepared to hit that save button for a while until you finally get a confirmation that the photo has actually been saved.
Stuff like this is not a problem when it's your first release, but 4 months on you'd expect a company like Google to be able to iron out quirks like these. But no, we get extra emoji as one of the few updates to the hangouts platform.
[edit: spelling]