[tramtrist]

Unreal indeed. I set up my wife's elderly parents in Japan with Hangouts years ago so we could video call them by actually.. you know.. hitting the 'call' button to ring their computer. This worked seamlessly for years with no effort on their part. When the computer 'rang' they knew to click answer. After hearing that hangouts was going away (what is it like 3 times that's been delayed?) I moved them to Google Chat but boy was that a mistake. You cannot 'ring' the other caller anymore and have to set up a meeting for each call. Or you have to set up a perpetual meeting which they can always go in to. This has caused us to miss many video calls and constant frustration for my wife trying to explain to them how to use that function. Why in the world does Google remove features in new solutions when they deprecate an old one? Can't they simply make a list of things that work in the old app and check them off in the new one? I realize zoom is all trendy now but geez...

Shoulda just stuck with Skype or something else.

[mananaysiempre]

For me, early Hangouts would frequently get stuck in one of a variety of broken states which made it apparent that a “meeting” (the eponymous hangout) was a separate thing in the system with its own identity rather than just a tuple of participants, even for two-party calls. That doesn’t excuse the UI changes (which I guess were done to differentiate the now-business-oriented Hangouts^WMeet from the new, consumer-oriented Duo?..), but the underlying machinery seems to have worked this way from the very beginning.

[flir]

I tried to leave a video chat channel open permanently, but they seem to go away after a bit over a day. Experiment with sneek, or one of the other "always on" solutions, maybe? They come with their own problems though.

They removed a button from hangouts a while back that let you send your location to the channel. I guess it wasn't used much, but it was useful to me. Made me miss protocols and RFCs.

The closed captioning in Chat is pretty amazing, though.

[easrng]

You want Duo, not Chat/Meet.

[briandear]

FaceTime does what you want.

[morsch]

Or Whatsapp. Or Signal. Or Telegram. They all work like that.

You'd think they designed it like that because it works well for their paid use case, using it for work. But no, it's really annoying to use in that context to. I can't call a colleague, instead I have to add an impromptu meeting to the chat, join it myself, wait until they show up. I mean, it's just two of three clicks instead of one, but still.

[plussed_reader]

Just gotta pony up the appletax to play with the facetime.

[lotsofpulp]

It was well worth it 10 years ago. My extended family almost solely decided to switch to Apple because grandparents who did not speak English and grew up in a poor developing country could all use FaceTime on iPad minis, but no one could figure out how to use Hangouts/Skype/etc.

[lxgr]

On Apple devices.