This is the kind of product strategy that I find so confusing.
All this cash, energy and time to compete with an app that hasn't got a lot of usage market share (Facetime) by doing practically the same thing. AI? Mmkay..
It's not competing (directly) with WhatsApp or the other big messengers and it's separated from another similar (Allo), which is also in the same position, under the same rationale.
Anyway, a company can dream about instant mass conversion, specially when they have pockets as deep as Google's.
All I see now is that.. a dream.
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It sucks that Knock Knock feature is not available on iPhone. Hopefully with iOS 10 may be it is possible. Though this feature is really innovative and now I think every video chat service should have this feature.
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@juberti Android: Cannot verify phone number. "Unable to send the request" outside US.
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Damn! Just got it.
That's a straightforward interface! No bs, not one bit.
Would be expecting this ~10Mb app to be about 30Mb by v2.
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Finally. Some cross-platform Facetime competition. I'm game, but I accidentally set Hangouts as my default INVITE app and can't figure out how to change it. Gah! Anyone?
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Hangouts with a preview?
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I agree with most of the comments. An other app from Google... How many can you launch? Tried to use Google Hangouts in the last years and despite the bad UX (especially inviting other participants in combination with multiple Google accounts), most people seem to prefer Skype if iPhone and android phones are used. Hopefully this works better as I am not a big fan of Skype (data usage). Let's see when this app will be available in the Dutch appstore :-) Will give this a try!
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