[elefantastisch]

Definitely this. I have been an Android user since my first smartphone. I've been a Gmail user much longer than that. I still to this day don't have the slightest idea what the distinction between Hangouts, Chat, and Messages (and whatever else I'm forgetting... Wave?) even is. Sometimes my new phone has an app called Chat, sometimes it's Messages, one time it was Hangouts... they all seem to be the same app to me.

So I just use WhatsApp.

[valdiorn]

I just checked what my pixel 6 has installed. I have something called "Duo", which, when I click it, shows me something called "Meet". Is it different from the other "meet" on my phone? Seems to be but not sure.

Google's communication services are so complex and poorly defined I avoid them like the plague, always have. I just don't understand what app to use and how they all relate.

[julianlam]

Yes. There's Meet, and then there's Meet (original), which is what was formerly called Hangouts... I think.

Doesn't matter, I always hit the wrong icon 50% of the time.

[joecool1029]

Meat, Wangouts, Allo, Duo(not duolingo)? Talk, or Chat?

I bet they took the team from Microsoft responsible for ramming the Skype/Lync/Communicator/Skype4Business brands into the ground and brought them over. Remember when Groove used to be Sharepoint but now it's a music player from them?

[avisser]

You're missing at least Duo & Google Voice (which was embedded into Hangouts, until it wasn't).

[joecool1029]

I have been using Voice since like 2007, it's one of the only services from Google I've latched onto because it's nearly impossible to steal a phone number out of it (nobody to social engineer and need to get access to Google Account and pay a few dollars to unlock the number). For YEARS, like 5+ nobody knew if they were shutting it down. It used to be possible to trunk SIP calls over Google Voice using GChat/Gtalk and XMPP to SIP bridge.

Out of nowhere they started to update it again sometime in the latter part of last decade, it still has 2 panels in the configuration backend because they halfassed implementing the Material interface and didn't include all the features. Despite this I'm ride or die with it because there's nothing else on the market that gives you a fairly un-stealable number for free.

Oh and to continue the fragmentation, Google Voice for Workspace is a totally different product similar to Vonage Cloud. As has often been the case with their paid services for years, the free users generally get a better experience.

EDIT: I honestly think a big part of the reason this has stayed running is Bandwidth.com runs most of the show under the hood and that company knows what they're doing. Another Google service they ran was GOOG-411 when that existed.