Hangouts almost nailed it, to be honest. For the people that I know who have both Hangouts and Whatsapp, we prefer Hangouts consistently - even for just text. The problem is that Google realised the importance of IM far too late and Whatsapp is now entrenched. Google is throwing solutions at the wall to see which sticks.

It honestly doesn't seem like a bad attempt. Totally would have preferred it in Hangouts, though, I'll probably drop Google IM altogether if Hangouts/XMPP C2S is not supported.

> For the people that I know who have both Hangouts and Whatsapp, we prefer Hangouts consistently - even for just text.

Speaking for myself, I've found Hangouts to be a noticeable drain on my battery (iOS), while WhatsApp seems negligible.

I'm also on a smaller screen iPhone, and with the icon bar and the timestamp placement in Hangouts, I can read far fewer messages on the screen at the same time than with WhatsApp.

Personal preference, but I also like that WhatsApp uses the iOS emoji across platforms, so I know what emoji my recipient is getting – when I use an emoji in Hangouts, they get replaced by a Google emoji, and I never know what it's going to look like until I've already sent the message.

Finally, Hangouts doesn't use end-to-end encryption, which personally makes me feel very uncomfortable (I also didn't like using WhatsApp for a long time for the same reason).

This is anecdotal, but to me it's more than WhatsApp just being entrenched – in many ways, they really do have the better product.

Whatsapp won that battle because Hangouts required a Google account, Whatsapp does not, just a phone number.

On a side note, I notice that Google's new services coming out only require a phone number, which I think will help them a lot.

Because Hangouts is a bloated POS? Everyone I know who works for Google states this (and I can concur from using it at work).

How on earth is hangouts "bloated"? It's a friggin IM app with video calling built in. It's far more minimal than most other "alternative" IM clients.

I don't know why it's "bloated", but after a few minutes of video chat it's got my computer sounding like a jetliner preparing for takeoff.

So will this in a couple years, and then it will be dismantled and sunset like the rest...

You do realize that's basically what's going to happen with this app yes?

I'm pretty much done with Google IM products. I have a few contacts that will keep using hangouts, but for the rest I either have them on Facebook or iMessage.

Easier to create a new code base and infrastructure than to bolt all the new features onto the old Hangouts code base. It also avoids the flip side argument/outcome to including it "I hate all these new features, it's ruined Hangouts."