Facebook has done a pretty poor job of unifying their messaging offering with WhatsApp. Long-time WhatsApp users may see this as a blessing but it's odd that you have seemingly competing teams owned by the same company putting out competing products, one of which has an outstanding API and the other which is basically a walled garden.
Google was in a unique position to deliver a best-in-class messaging client and own the space: they have more users than Facebook or Apple and more good will than either of those companies (based on my own personal opinion and interactions).
Despite that, they've had numerous messaging platforms: Google Talk, Waze (kind of), Hangouts, and Google Voice. I wouldn't call any of them great products - they've all done barely good enough to stay useful, falling short in the areas of cross-platform reliability, group messaging, and multimedia messaging. Meanwhile companies like Slack are eating their lunch. I love Slack (and have in fact moved to using a private Slack team for personal messaging among friends) but it still saddens me a bit that a Google has failed to deliver a solid offering here.
Google was in a unique position to deliver a best-in-class messaging client and own the space: they have more users than Facebook or Apple and more good will than either of those companies (based on my own personal opinion and interactions).
Despite that, they've had numerous messaging platforms: Google Talk, Waze (kind of), Hangouts, and Google Voice. I wouldn't call any of them great products - they've all done barely good enough to stay useful, falling short in the areas of cross-platform reliability, group messaging, and multimedia messaging. Meanwhile companies like Slack are eating their lunch. I love Slack (and have in fact moved to using a private Slack team for personal messaging among friends) but it still saddens me a bit that a Google has failed to deliver a solid offering here.