Using any client other than the crappy extension for Chrome, you can't do group text chats. Flamingo[0] is an amazing XMPP client for Hangouts, but is useless for work because we use group chats for everything.
Drives me crazy, and Google refuse to release an actual API for Hangouts, so it's not being fixed anytime soon. I'm trying to convince work to move to IRC or HipChat, or anything other than Hangouts (but my boss loves Google everything, so that's a losing battle).
> and Google refuse to release an actual API for Hangouts
In old good days we didn't ask for protocols. We just took the specs by force, by reverse engineering. Worked well with ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and loads of others, except for, possibly, Skype (which was reverse engineered, but late to the party)
And "alternative" messengers survived and even prospered (seriously outplaying the dysfunctional, overweight and ad-ridden "official" ones), even if they were actively fought by network owners. Given that official Hangouts "desktop" app is is nearly completely unusable - and even more for those who don't use Chrome - and even web messenging support is lacking (you just can't put a button "Contact me on Hangouts" on your site), I'm a bit curious why no one cared about Hangouts enough to play that game once again.
Well, anger may lead to various possibilities. I had reverse engineered certain cloud storage service client protocol when I was told there won't be any cake (properly functioning GNU/Linux client software customers were promised for a long time) for me and I have to fuck off. And I had not published it only because RE laws in my country seem to be totally messed up - they literally say I can't publish my findings. Wish I'd live somewhere saner.
Still, as I believe, quite a lot of people use Hangouts. Sure, there must be a hacker somewhere who's upset enough to mess with the software.
Uh... I'm too young for that, unfortunately. But as I get it that first they wrote the implementation(s), then - seeing it's reasonably good - documented the results for everyone to discuss and use.
The point is, they had an idea, hacked the software (without any standards, at that point, as I understand, this was the case with IRC which had RFCed only 10 years after the birth), then willingly shared the knowledge.
Yes! It's really frustrating because if you are using another chat client (e.g. Apple messages), everything seems to work except you won't see any sign of group chats. This has caused plenty confusion for me with friends wondering why I'm not responding to messages.
What's even worse is that Google's hangouts app is pretty much unusable. For some reason it doesn't list all of my contacts, won't show if anyone is available and gives no indication about who I could chat with.
We don't we just stop using google hangouts if they are such a PoS? Is it the screen sharing? Everyone is already logged in? I find them infuriating, and only use it begrudgingly.
Using any client other than the crappy extension for Chrome, you can't do group text chats. Flamingo[0] is an amazing XMPP client for Hangouts, but is useless for work because we use group chats for everything.
Drives me crazy, and Google refuse to release an actual API for Hangouts, so it's not being fixed anytime soon. I'm trying to convince work to move to IRC or HipChat, or anything other than Hangouts (but my boss loves Google everything, so that's a losing battle).
[0] http://flamingo.im