fne8w2ahGoogle's messaging mess continues: Chat app now wants to be the next WhatsApp
Can’t wait to see Google rename or kill Chat because it’s not gaining traction as expected.
Many have tried, many have failed.
You simply need a killer feature to get people to change.
whatsapp's killer feature was "no killer features, just a messaging app with number-bound IDs and good UI". for anything like that I'd change, but the minute they add something like numberless IDs, or stickers, or a social media feature, they can fuck right off.
WhatsApps main "killer feature" was being early in the market to quickly reach a critical user mass.
Doesn't matter which competitor, people will install an alternative, see that only 5-10% of their contacts have it and will immediately uninstall.
I see potential in preinstalled messaging apps. But it needs to be cross-compatible between iOS and Android. Otherwise it won't fly.
WhatsApp killer feature was "No paying for SMS ever, just your data bills", which was much lower than SMS fees in many many countries, which also explains the popularity of WhatsApp outside of the USA and in many Asian countries.
And it was tied to your phone number instead of a login ID, so anyone with a WhatsApp sign up could interact anyone else who had it, instead of having to find your contacts again like with a new IM service.
Google's tried a few times. Allo, hangouts, and probably others.
katy ✨Allo, mate
Committing to any new google products is just asking to be disappointment.
There is no culture of keeping and improving any product anymore, if there ever was.
There is no culture of keeping and improving any product anymore, if there ever was.
I’ve always suspected that the reason Google keeps abandoning products is because they’re actually in it for the data. They’re not out to make a good RSS feed reader or a good music service, they’re interested in how people use feed readers or how people use music. Once they sucked all the data they wanted out of it they trash it.
There’s also data sources which they’ve never abandoned, like watching people’s location (baked into Android and Maps), or email, or photos, or files (Drive), and of course web search. Probably because the nature of this kind of data remains always relevant.
This is all very interesting for chat because they’ve been revisiting this product category so many times, trashing and re-doing chat clients in endless variations, as opposed to sticking to one or two (one for enterprise and one for regular people, for example). Not sure what that says about chat as a data source. Either it’s a particularly challenging category, or it keeps evolving so Google keep discovering new angles that are worth mining.
myxiGoogle Chat is trash. It can’t beat Signal in terms of features and never will because Chat is by Google.
Taasz/WoofI wonder how long this one will stick around for…