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Google Fi: Simple Until It's Not
An anonymous reader writes: When Google started Project Fi, one of their big goals was to make cell phone calling simple and predictable. By combining Wi-Fi calling with cellular networks and flat $10/GB pricing, they're trying to put together a service that "just works." But as Dieter Bohn writes, things can get a lot more complicated when you try to integrate it with other Google services, like Voice. He says, "Precisely what happens when you port your number from Voice to Fi (which are kind of the same thing — but not really!) is clear as mud. ... You won't lose your Google Voice number, and it will still do most of the stuff it did before, but you may have to wend your way back to the 2011-era Google Voice site to manage it. Your texts no longer forward via SMS but they're available in the Hangouts App. You can't call people from Google Voice on the web but you can from Hangouts. Oh, and on Android there's a Hangouts dialer app you can use, sometimes, just because."
It's flailing around, trying to find coherence and not finding it.
Use one model.
Use one service. (Fi should be an extension of VOICE...)
Monetize it, but don't do it the way you're currently doing it.
Quit lying to yourselves about you not being a telecom company. You became one with GV and buying up Gizmo5.
The biggest problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too- and can't reconcile themselves to being a Common Carrier with all that this entails. And...it shows.
We wouldn't need to consume so much data if so many web sites didn't serve up so much goddamn useless JavaScript code, excessive HTML, and unnecessarily huge images. Jesus Christ, I can't believe it when I visit some web sites and for a single page load it ends up fetching over 1 MB of scripts, images, markup, CSS, and other shit! Some of them even serve up goddamn video of some hipster doing some stupid activity, which plays as the background of the page! It's one thing when data is consumed to serve up video content that somebody actually wants to watch, but it's absolutely idiotic when a web site serves up many MB of video that's the goddamn background of the web page! We won't need GB of data just for basic web browsing if we went back to reasonably sized pages, without so much useless hipster content.
I'm using Fi. I can have no phone signal at home which is common and I can make calls through Fi. You don't need hangouts dialer (you need hangouts installed not hangouts dialer), you just use the regular dialer. Text messages and voice work great!
If using the regular phone dialer and text messaging is too difficult for you, then maybe you should not be using a cell service.
Just fucking ignore that guy(s).
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
First, this IS the testing phase. As long as Google is paying attention to weird interactions within their services, this will likely be ironed out. Second, if this is the biggest problem the service has so far, I submit that it really isn't that bad. Good to know, but not really a big deal to most. On the other hand, if Google wants to be successful in this space, they will need to get this worked out before Project Fi is a generally available thing. Otherwise they really are just flailing about (but artfully).
$10/GB is way overpriced. The telco oligopoly is screwingvyou guys over there. Here (Holland) I get 11gb for 30 EUR. And 10 of that is an add-on pack for 10 eur
Just try to text a picture from your iCloud account. Apple verified that the easiest way to do it is to email it to yourself with the image then go to the email app then copy it to your camera roll by clicking on the nonobvious left arrow then click Save Image then go the message app then click on the camera icon and select the picture. iCloud is very much not integrated with iOS.
I'm a developer.
Integrating two different technologies together seamlessly is *extremely difficult*, folks! Roughly 1/3 of the programmers in our company do little more than maintain integration and "bridges" with other vendor products for our clients. They want what we have to offer, and they want it to work with other products, too.
Our database schema is north of 500 tables. Despite having a proper signal/handler based, modular, service oriented architecture, and careful attention to best practices and the willingness to refactor as soon as deemed necessary, keeping all these different parts working together is a *tough job*.
I am not at all surprised that even Google is having trouble integrating their existing voice products with Cell and Wifi. That they are even trying is enough to keep programmers up at night, staring at the ceiling in a state of mild panic.
If they are successful, I will be impressed.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Maybe if google made people use just one google ID across all google services, these problems would go away. Possibly something like a google+ ID ....
Far too expensive.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
You got a beef with that guy?
Been using it for a month now as both a Google Voice user and someone who has GV in not-a-gmail-dot-com email address (i.e. my own domain).
Fi won't allow you to use a non-gmail-dot-com email address, period, and this makes things even a bit weirder (and I couldn't really port my GV number to Fi anyway for that reason).
That said, the base service itself runs REALLY well--switching between networks works nearly flawlessly (and there are definite times AT&T drops and TMob kicks in). As the writer of the article states, if you don't use GV (and I'll add do use a @gmail.com address normally), you're golden.
Oh, and you can't forward your GV number to Fi either (I had to forward to a "real" phone, then back to Fi. Works, but kludgy).
They'll get it together and it'll be fine. In the meantime, this early adopter had to jump through some hurdles and that's OK. If you're an existing GV user and can't cope with weird, don't bother with Fi until they get it fixed up.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
ahahahhaah moo moo moo
That's the business YOU and THEY are supposed to be in- it's the raison d' etre there.
If you can't integrate it so that the users can't see it- you've FAILED at your designated task for the money you're wanting to collect.
No excuses (being that I'm in that business as well) and no whinging or excusing other businesses is allowed here. If it's a miss, you get rightly panned by customers.
I am in Manhattan a mere 5 blocks away from the Verizon CO and they are not planning on giving me more than 3mbit here.
Try your point again only when your 25mbit Comcast service is available on our basic tablet and phone services without overage charges that you so happily don't have to pay yet for cable. Ttoday's websites may be responsive but the powers that be demand tracking for ads and therefore the JS cannot degrade gracefully. The assumption is that they won't allow for third world data plans
plans and devices because developers in the US never choose to CODE day in and out in the poor real life conditions that their lightning QA rounds quickly handwaves as good enough.
The shame is when support and the devs art your own company must disable ads because troubleshooting your own sites is too slow and flash-crashy... and you rationalize that visitors are oblivious to that same fact because NOBODY would exercise the freedom to ever have more than a single tab for your site open at once :)
I like my Republic Wireless phone. Seamless Cell to Wifi handoff. I've had it > 1 yr
Wow, 24/7 full speed, from every server.
Even on broadband connections in this day and age, i still frequently have to wait 20 seconds for some ad connection before page loads.