The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists, eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for real. The Google Graveyard is full of apps like Reader, Duo, Inbox, Allo, Wallet, and countless others that have been through The Google Cycle, and it feels just as bad every time.
Hangouts could have been what WA is these days.
@motopazzo @pelespirit Google controls Android.
If that company had its act together, Hangouts would now basically be WhatsApp plus Slack combined.
Except deeply integrated into all of Google’s Apps.
The silver lining for consumers is we dodged a duopoly on messaging apps (Hangouts plus iMessage) because Google was too incompetent to pull it off.
Msn Messenger could have been that, if they bothered to make even a Java app for that instead of having that stupid Java app that used an SMS bridge that was super expensive to the end user