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0 pointslotsofpulp8y ago0 comments

Facetime works very well, my family uses it from 4 different continents around the world, from cities to villages, varying from toddlers to nonagenarians who didn't even go to school or know English. I don't know why something cross platform can't work as well as Facetime does.

I had hope for Hangouts, but Google dropped the ball big time in terms of user complexity and quality of product as they are wont to do.

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ghaff8y ago

Someone had me use Hangouts for a press livestreaming thing a couple of weeks back. I was actually surprised at how the UI had improved since I last used it.

I agree that video conferencing is rather fragmented but I'm honestly not sure how much that has slowed adoption. People just don't want to use video in a lot of cases. Essentially all my internal calls are on a videoconferencing system and I doubt I turn on the webcam 25% of the time. (We do use screen sharing a fair bit though.)

linkregister8y ago

Google Duo is a vast improvement over Hangouts for quality and resilience. It has been almost as good as Facetime for me. Duo is also available on iOS and Android.

It is conspicuously absent on any other platform; even Android tablets can't use Duo, let alone a Linux, Windows, or macOS machine. So it's a hell of a walled garden.

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