Without doubt, instant messaging has come a long way in the last decade. If I stop and think about it, back then, it was still something I sat by my desktop computer and had brief scheduled ‘chat sessions’ and then turned off the internet, but now they’re on my mobile phone chiming and dinging every few minutes even in the ungodliest of hours about a funny picture I’ve received.
In this post, I will compare two very specific chat clients that I think have made a big impact in the way we chat now and have evolved tremendously in the last couple of years - Hangouts (formerly Google Talk) and WhatsApp. They are also the chat clients I use the most. In the following paragraphs, I shall briefly introduce the two apps and try to analyse their pluses and minuses until I am left confused without a clear winner.
Google Talk was a free, minimalistic chat client for Windows PC that released in 2005 and could, apart from the obvious messaging function, handle some basic internet calls and perform file transfers. It was easy on memory and unobtrusive in behaviour. When Android released some years later, Talk was available as a native app on Android and worked quite well.
Slowly but steadily, internet became more easily accessible and mobile phones grew smarter, and the concept of SMS slowly faded away to make way for internet-based IMs. Among the many that surfaced, WhatsApp released in 2009 and stood out like the iPod of chat applications for smartphones. WhatsApp has since then been growing in popularity and user base (900 million active users as I write this post). It is now one of the most downloaded chat apps on any mobile platform. WhatsApp is practically free to use if you’re living in India. Although the yearly subscription rate is some fifty rupees, my service has been automatically renewed for free the last four years. Bless them for that.
Google, realising the need to fight back, unified all their chat services (Talk, GMail chat, and Google+ chat) thus ending that nasty confusion, and created one single chat service, Hangouts.
Hangouts was rubbish to begin with. It was no longer available on Windows as a standalone application, but instead on their Chrome browser as an extension that needed Chrome to be running all the time. This dirty move à la Microsoft, forced everyone to switch to their memory-hogging Chrome browser. The Android version of Hangouts was no better either; existing Talk profiles were converted to Google+ profiles that no one wanted and the app itself was dreadfully slow. Hangouts had killed everything that was good about Talk; the speed, the simplicity, and some really useful features like the Translate Bot that did some super quick language translation.
I was deeply displeased with Hangouts for the longest time. It was only after a year or two that Google took notice of all its flaws and began to fix them one-by-one. Hangouts received a new lease of life when Google decided to scrap the flawed Chrome extension for a much improved Chrome app that ran independently of the Chrome browser. The Android app too has come a long way now, but is still not strong with the basics - speed and reliability in message delivery has always has been Hangouts' Achilles heel and remains to this day a big annoyance.
WhatsApp uses a telephone number for user identification, unlike Hangouts that needs a GMail address, and that has its limitations. You see, a telephone number is usually considered personal and is given away only with the giver’s consent. WhatsApp has axed that concept because anyone with your telephone number can add you to a group without your permission, and a group on WhatsApp can have as many as a hundred participants. So if you have been added to a group by an acquaintance with whom you shared your number, your number is still visible to every participant in that group. Yes, even the ones you didn’t want to share your number with.
The modern-day Hangouts is really quite clever and intuitive in some ways. Let’s say you've received a text that reads “Where are you?”, or something along that line, Hangouts will place a button below that so you can share your current location easily. In group conversations, it will show small favicons of the participants to indicate till where each participant has read. So, it has these nifty little features that sets it apart from the rest; and you can tell it's a Google product. Oh, and did I mention that it supports animated GIF images?
But all this is still not the reason why Hangouts trumps WhatsApp in terms of versatility and convenience. It is simply because Hangouts is truly a cross-platform and more importantly a cross-device app. I can arrive home texting on my Android phone or tablet and continue the conversation on my PC or Chromebook seamlessly without missing a single message. If I mute notifications on one device, they stay muted on all my devices. But what if I had an iPhone or Mac? It's cool. Hangouts is available on iOS and Macintosh. But what if I had a Windows Phone? Well, nope, sorry. That’s one platform on which you won’t find Hangouts, or most of the other Google apps, in fact. Let’s just say Google and Microsoft aren’t the thickest of friends in that respect.
WhatsApp is purely meant for smartphones and can support only one telephone number on one device. On that account alone, I think WhatsApp is considerably handicapped. On the plus-side, WhatsApp excels where Hangouts falls short. If there’s no internet connectivity, Hangouts will simply throw its hands in the air and give up and you’ll be left hitting resend until your message is finally gone. And in a place like Bangalore, where I live, finding internet signal on your phone is like finding water in a desert. WhatsApp, I believe is more successful in getting messages across even with poor internet connections. This is probably one of the reasons why WhatsApp is so famous in India; it just works.
WhatsApp can’t do video calls but it can do voice calls over the internet, and while it’s probably not Skype-good in terms of quality, it works OK for the most part, which is more than I can say for Hangouts because Hangouts will send itself into a tizzy if you attempt voice or video calling. Upon dialling, all the devices will start to ring and won’t stop even if you have answered or rejected the call. Hangouts has decent call quality, but the app is so badly made that it will show you as still connected in a call long after you’re through with it. The call button on Hangouts is one of those buttons you just never should press even by accident; just try to ignore its presence on the chat screen. On PC, you'll have to install a plugin on your browser to make it work. In short, you're better off with Skype for serious video calling.
So, do we have a winner?
Hangouts is really the one I want to root for because it doesn’t tie me down to one device and has some cool features, but it lacks some basic skills when the going gets tough. I think it’s safe to say that Hangouts is an app that’s at home when you’re at home. No really, it’s true, because in a perfect world, where you’re connected to WiFi and the internet’s steady, Hangouts is comfy around itself and will behave the way it should. Step outside, and Hangouts will start to struggle; sending messages will be a pain, leave alone pictures. Well, that’s probably the case with the city I live in. Elsewhere, Hangouts should still work fine.
WhatsApp is a much newer product that has only one small purpose, and it fulfills it well. I like to think of WhatsApp as a modern replacement to SMS, and the reason I say that is because, in its rather short history, I have seen WhatsApp grow from being something so basic and so SMS-like to being what it is today. Features like message archival, read receipts, calling, voice messages, and even instant picture capture were added to it much later in its life while these weren’t new concepts outside the WhatsApp world. I also think that WhatsApp, as a design, is so saturated now that it has no space to grow. Much like the city I live in, WhatsApp now feels congested and every update and fix it gets seems unplanned and makeshift. For example, WhatsApp Web, a feature that was added recently attempts to mirror the conversations on a computer monitor for easy reading and typing. It is seemingly cumbersome because you have to go to the trouble of entering a URL in a browser and scanning a QR code to make it work while ensuring a stable internet connection on your phone as well as computer. It is not a substitute for a proper PC client by any means.
At the moment, I'm afraid I really can't decide on a winner, but if I simply had to pick, it would be Hangouts. This old-timer from Google has come a really long way, and I think there's still a lot of room for growth and improvement.
Frankly, I think the direction in which all IM clients should be headed in the future is harmony. You should be able to use any IM you prefer while still maintaining the type of ID and chat protocol you want to use. You should be able to chat with someone who is on Facebook Messenger even if you aren't on it and use only WhatsApp. I’m told such a universal app is quite difficult to engineer, and I suppose that sort of unification will come with its own limitations. Oh well, I guess you can't please them all.
Until next time…
Vignesh
In this post, I will compare two very specific chat clients that I think have made a big impact in the way we chat now and have evolved tremendously in the last couple of years - Hangouts (formerly Google Talk) and WhatsApp. They are also the chat clients I use the most. In the following paragraphs, I shall briefly introduce the two apps and try to analyse their pluses and minuses until I am left confused without a clear winner.
Google Talk was a free, minimalistic chat client for Windows PC that released in 2005 and could, apart from the obvious messaging function, handle some basic internet calls and perform file transfers. It was easy on memory and unobtrusive in behaviour. When Android released some years later, Talk was available as a native app on Android and worked quite well.
Slowly but steadily, internet became more easily accessible and mobile phones grew smarter, and the concept of SMS slowly faded away to make way for internet-based IMs. Among the many that surfaced, WhatsApp released in 2009 and stood out like the iPod of chat applications for smartphones. WhatsApp has since then been growing in popularity and user base (900 million active users as I write this post). It is now one of the most downloaded chat apps on any mobile platform. WhatsApp is practically free to use if you’re living in India. Although the yearly subscription rate is some fifty rupees, my service has been automatically renewed for free the last four years. Bless them for that.
Google, realising the need to fight back, unified all their chat services (Talk, GMail chat, and Google+ chat) thus ending that nasty confusion, and created one single chat service, Hangouts.
Hangouts was rubbish to begin with. It was no longer available on Windows as a standalone application, but instead on their Chrome browser as an extension that needed Chrome to be running all the time. This dirty move à la Microsoft, forced everyone to switch to their memory-hogging Chrome browser. The Android version of Hangouts was no better either; existing Talk profiles were converted to Google+ profiles that no one wanted and the app itself was dreadfully slow. Hangouts had killed everything that was good about Talk; the speed, the simplicity, and some really useful features like the Translate Bot that did some super quick language translation.
I was deeply displeased with Hangouts for the longest time. It was only after a year or two that Google took notice of all its flaws and began to fix them one-by-one. Hangouts received a new lease of life when Google decided to scrap the flawed Chrome extension for a much improved Chrome app that ran independently of the Chrome browser. The Android app too has come a long way now, but is still not strong with the basics - speed and reliability in message delivery has always has been Hangouts' Achilles heel and remains to this day a big annoyance.
WhatsApp uses a telephone number for user identification, unlike Hangouts that needs a GMail address, and that has its limitations. You see, a telephone number is usually considered personal and is given away only with the giver’s consent. WhatsApp has axed that concept because anyone with your telephone number can add you to a group without your permission, and a group on WhatsApp can have as many as a hundred participants. So if you have been added to a group by an acquaintance with whom you shared your number, your number is still visible to every participant in that group. Yes, even the ones you didn’t want to share your number with.
The modern-day Hangouts is really quite clever and intuitive in some ways. Let’s say you've received a text that reads “Where are you?”, or something along that line, Hangouts will place a button below that so you can share your current location easily. In group conversations, it will show small favicons of the participants to indicate till where each participant has read. So, it has these nifty little features that sets it apart from the rest; and you can tell it's a Google product. Oh, and did I mention that it supports animated GIF images?
But all this is still not the reason why Hangouts trumps WhatsApp in terms of versatility and convenience. It is simply because Hangouts is truly a cross-platform and more importantly a cross-device app. I can arrive home texting on my Android phone or tablet and continue the conversation on my PC or Chromebook seamlessly without missing a single message. If I mute notifications on one device, they stay muted on all my devices. But what if I had an iPhone or Mac? It's cool. Hangouts is available on iOS and Macintosh. But what if I had a Windows Phone? Well, nope, sorry. That’s one platform on which you won’t find Hangouts, or most of the other Google apps, in fact. Let’s just say Google and Microsoft aren’t the thickest of friends in that respect.
WhatsApp is purely meant for smartphones and can support only one telephone number on one device. On that account alone, I think WhatsApp is considerably handicapped. On the plus-side, WhatsApp excels where Hangouts falls short. If there’s no internet connectivity, Hangouts will simply throw its hands in the air and give up and you’ll be left hitting resend until your message is finally gone. And in a place like Bangalore, where I live, finding internet signal on your phone is like finding water in a desert. WhatsApp, I believe is more successful in getting messages across even with poor internet connections. This is probably one of the reasons why WhatsApp is so famous in India; it just works.
WhatsApp can’t do video calls but it can do voice calls over the internet, and while it’s probably not Skype-good in terms of quality, it works OK for the most part, which is more than I can say for Hangouts because Hangouts will send itself into a tizzy if you attempt voice or video calling. Upon dialling, all the devices will start to ring and won’t stop even if you have answered or rejected the call. Hangouts has decent call quality, but the app is so badly made that it will show you as still connected in a call long after you’re through with it. The call button on Hangouts is one of those buttons you just never should press even by accident; just try to ignore its presence on the chat screen. On PC, you'll have to install a plugin on your browser to make it work. In short, you're better off with Skype for serious video calling.
So, do we have a winner?
Hangouts is really the one I want to root for because it doesn’t tie me down to one device and has some cool features, but it lacks some basic skills when the going gets tough. I think it’s safe to say that Hangouts is an app that’s at home when you’re at home. No really, it’s true, because in a perfect world, where you’re connected to WiFi and the internet’s steady, Hangouts is comfy around itself and will behave the way it should. Step outside, and Hangouts will start to struggle; sending messages will be a pain, leave alone pictures. Well, that’s probably the case with the city I live in. Elsewhere, Hangouts should still work fine.
WhatsApp is a much newer product that has only one small purpose, and it fulfills it well. I like to think of WhatsApp as a modern replacement to SMS, and the reason I say that is because, in its rather short history, I have seen WhatsApp grow from being something so basic and so SMS-like to being what it is today. Features like message archival, read receipts, calling, voice messages, and even instant picture capture were added to it much later in its life while these weren’t new concepts outside the WhatsApp world. I also think that WhatsApp, as a design, is so saturated now that it has no space to grow. Much like the city I live in, WhatsApp now feels congested and every update and fix it gets seems unplanned and makeshift. For example, WhatsApp Web, a feature that was added recently attempts to mirror the conversations on a computer monitor for easy reading and typing. It is seemingly cumbersome because you have to go to the trouble of entering a URL in a browser and scanning a QR code to make it work while ensuring a stable internet connection on your phone as well as computer. It is not a substitute for a proper PC client by any means.
At the moment, I'm afraid I really can't decide on a winner, but if I simply had to pick, it would be Hangouts. This old-timer from Google has come a really long way, and I think there's still a lot of room for growth and improvement.
Frankly, I think the direction in which all IM clients should be headed in the future is harmony. You should be able to use any IM you prefer while still maintaining the type of ID and chat protocol you want to use. You should be able to chat with someone who is on Facebook Messenger even if you aren't on it and use only WhatsApp. I’m told such a universal app is quite difficult to engineer, and I suppose that sort of unification will come with its own limitations. Oh well, I guess you can't please them all.
Until next time…
Vignesh
