This limits and subtracts from Hangouts for no real benefit.
Hangouts works on phones, tablets and laptops. It does voice, video and text. Fragmenting these features across apps and devices seems to be a major step backwards...but apparently two apps is simpler than one?
This strategy seems to have born out of Facebook's success with breaking up the app into specialized features (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp etc.)
The only break up here was Messenger, and even there they did not just continue the feature but gradually phased it out to make sure people are actually following. Messenger still uses the same network behind and did not create a separate one.
Instagram and Whatsapp are just examples of how not to kill a successful product. Turns out it's quite simple: You change nothing.
>Instagram and Whatsapp are just examples of how not to kill a successful product. Turns out it's quite simple: You change nothing.
For a long time it seemed like the strategy was to change nothing. Now it's become clear the strategy is to be scared of changing anything, just leave it to fester and fall behind then panic and recklessly start cloning competitors features and diluting what made the service compelling in the first place.
Hangouts works on phones, tablets and laptops. It does voice, video and text. Fragmenting these features across apps and devices seems to be a major step backwards...but apparently two apps is simpler than one?