Hangouts

Google Hangouts is suddenly consuming 7 MB per day over mobile connection. To send a few plain text messages? It's ridiculous. I turned off the "Improve Hangouts" option but it didn't help.

[Edited by endolith, March 05]

[Edited by endolith, July 16]

This doesn't seem to happen anymore, but it's a bit dirty that Google embraced, extended and extinguished other chat protocols like AIM. It used to use an open-source protocol but then Google decided the walled garden would make them more money? Sigh.

On Gmail and on every new Android device there is this crappy Hangouts App and Google do it the Google Way: THEY decide for you and that make me not want to be a part of the app with this redicoulos name that sounds like a 12 year old made it up.

And when Skype works just completly fine and Viber is an option I can not see why give Google this part of the internet and your privacy to.

i will never understand the love Hangouts gets and it is completely unwarranted. Had Google simply developed Gtalk beyond beta Hangouts might of actually become the Gtalk on steroids version we are still asking for. i think it was roughly 5 years in total gtalk stayed around (the entire time in beta) and up until near the end it still worked pretty well. Coming over from gtalk to Hangouts i was quite irritated to see that file transfer had been completely removed and every time i dragged a zip file or some other file to share Hangouts would tell me to email it to that contact instead grrrrrr! how infuriating because when i wanted to share a video of some gaming footage i just recorded that was say 100mb or as little as 20mb i obviously couldn't email it to my contact because of file size limits put in place and Google knows that! (dick move) i occasionally send a message on it when i get a new android device and i am still installing and setting up apps, to get a message across but other than that i have no interest in Hangouts. It still only serves me as a reminder of how Google killed Gtalk for no good reason besides being dicks. i honestly couldn't say if the latest versions are much different than that of the last time i tried using it seriously but i doubt very much it does what i want and does more what Google wants than anything else.

i've been using hangout for a while now and has proven to so much faster and better that skype. I honestly wouldn't go back to use skype, this one is faster and easier so i recommend this one.

I still use hangouts, but I find it severely lacking in several aspects:

• no dark mode
• sub-par emojis and stickers
• no search function for emoji's
• no GIF functionality
• no file transfer functionality
• heavily compresses/resizes JPG
• used to support phone SMS, but that functionality has since been dropped. (App still notifies me on non-SMS tablet devices).
• should be merged or integrated with Google Voice. Google voice will send text and voicemail to hangouts, but you cannot use hangouts to send text or call using google voice. You can use the Hangouts Dialer (now abandonware) app to call using google voice, but that is yet another app you have to install.