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It was all the way back in October of last year that Google gave iOS users a nice little update to the Hangouts app. As pointed out in a previous post, Hangouts on iOS gave its users the ability to make phone calls (using their Google Voice numbers) over WiFi — whether their devices had a SIM card/cellular service or not. It was a pretty nice update, one that set many an Android fanboy raging over the seemingly preferential treatment given to iOS users. Well, I hate to get your panties in a bunch, but it looks like it’s happening again…
Last week, Google finally updated the iOS app and once again — it’s a doozy. This time around, Hangouts finally adheres to iOS 7 guidelines and adds new features that not only catch it up to its Android counterpart, but surpass it in some ways. iOS users can, not only send cute animated stickers in Hangouts, but short, 10 second video clips as well.
Okay, so animated stickers isn’t too big a deal, but video messaging? Holy crap. This would virtually eliminate the need for other services like Snapchat. Where voice calling likely has numerous technical hurdles keeping the Hangouts team from bringing it to Android devices, we’re hoping video messaging (and animated stickers) will soon be making its way to the Android version.
Nothing has been confirmed by Google, but expect at the very least animated animated stickers soon making their way to Hangouts for Android in a future update. We’ll keep an eye out.
You are absolutely rockin’ those pink earphones. :D
Was too lazy to grab mine from upstairs and my cousin’s were close by. Lol
If the down votes weren’t broken I would down vote this ;)
Technically, they are not broken. Disqus just doesn’t show the count anymore (which really sucks).
I think it’s awesome. If we could, I would have gotten rid of down voting all together. It’s just too negative. If you don’t agree with something, simply move along. Nice online etiquette. :)
This reminds me of the facebook plugin for your web browser which lets you dislike things on facebook haha, and anybody else with that same plugin can count the dislikes for any particulare thing. Yet I agree with you… perhaps we should leave things alone.
I think down voting does serve a purpose. Sometimes people make claims that aren’t true. Down voting is a way for people to indicate that. It also give you a way to indicate whether you agree or not in a non-offensive way. You might as well get rid of up voting, as well. By only allowing up votes, you give people a false sense of how well-received a comment really is. It’s kind of like having a baseball game where nobody keeps score.
As far as negativity, the comments some people make on here are far worse than a down vote.
I’m still confused as to why Google does this
Google has separate development teams for iOS and Android. iOS has fewer device models to build for and they’re almost always up to date software wise. With Android you have to deal with a lot more variables.
It doesn’t make sense because on iOS people are much more included to use iMessage since it’s already there and automatic out of the box. With Hangouts you have to go through multiple steps to get it to send a single message. Why the update iOS first is beyond me.
hangouts is more than just a google phone to google phone device, i use it to talk to plenty of people who are on gchat on their computers, many of whom use gmail on their macs.
other android phone makers need to make hangouts the default messaging app for their phones so that it can rival imessage. i have yet to know more than 4 people who use google hangouts and none of which have an iphone. only way itll ever become a threat on iOS is if they make all android phones use hangouts as if it were imessage.
Except Hangouts is crap and never works well. Even Android makers know this fact and its why they still put their own messaging app instead of Hangouts.
they do not need todo this. I use hangouts for my gchat replacement, but i still the interface is a step back from google talk
well the main issue i have with android is that there are no factory apps for things like video chat, there is no default standard. for example, any person with an iphone is able to simply facetime because every iphone has it. With android there is no standard, there are numerous video chat apps and no default program for users making it a chore to do something as simple as video chat. one android user might have hangouts, another has skype, another might have tango, and before you know it you’ll have 5 different video chat clients just to keep in touch with different people
ah i see what you are saying, i was thinking about text integration for some reason. I was saying i don’t want hangouts text messaging to replace all phones default messenger. I don’t like the integration and would prefer to keep my gchat separate from my text at this moment.
I’m still upset that google didn’t bring wifi calling to android devices. On top of that they are closing the other apps that let you do that. Not cool google, not cool.
Dafuq!
I think it’s cool that Google is creating nice apps for iOS. It could be a good strategy for getting future Android converters. However, that isn’t going to work out so well for Google if people switch to Android and can’t get the same or better functionality they could on iOS. It’s more likely to frustrate those people. I hope Google has a big update coming to Hangouts on Android really soon.
I have this sort of conspiracy theory about this whole thing that they’re working on an update that will phase out the current Google Voice android app and absorb it into Hangouts. That’d explain why it’s taken so long for them to roll out VoIP calling and it would only make sense to integrate G Voice texting since we’ve got regular texting services through Hangouts now.
…I also say this because I really, really, want it to happen.
Google Voice integration is all I really care about at this point. Once Hangouts has functionality to send/receive texts to my Google number, make calls from and accept calls to my Google number, and display my Google number voicemails, I will be happy.