Google Abandons Their Google Hangouts API (techcrunch.com)

"Once again we're seeing the hazards of developing using a third party service API," writes Slashdot reader BarbaraHudson, reporting that Google "will be discontinuing support for the Google Hangouts API going forward... Google Hangouts is now so insignificant that the cancellation didn't even rate an official blog post. As reported by TechCrunch, "just an updated FAQ and email notification to developers active on the API, forwarded to us by one of these devs." TechCrunch writes: As Google pushes Duo as its consumer video chat app and relegates Hangouts to the enterprise, it's dropping the flexibility to build these kinds of experiences. The email explains... "We understand this will impact developers who have invested in our platform. We have carefully considered this change and believe that it allows us to give our users a more targeted Hangouts desktop video experience going forward."
TechCrunch calls the move "a casualty of Google's fragmented messaging app strategy and the neglect of Hangouts itself." While some apps will continue working -- for example, integration with Slack -- their API's FAQ now ends with a reminder that "Users of apps will see a notice in the call letting them know that the app they're using will no longer work after April 25th."

Comments

Good Riddance

[Khyber]

Hangouts should've been renamed to Hangups. Connection issues were so rampant, and was one of the primary reasons Google Helpouts failed so badly.

Re:Good Riddance

[drizuid]

Hangouts should've been renamed to Hangups. Connection issues were so rampant, and was one of the primary reasons Google Helpouts failed so badly.

I disagree. I used hangouts to call my wife and kids frequently from Afghanistan over a 2Mbps satellite connection and never experienced a hangup. in fact, the voice and video quality was FAR superior to any other voice/video offering on the market. It worked for me in 2007-8 and 2011-12 without a hitch. I have also leveraged it for years in my asterisk pbx without issues on hours long conference calls. that being said, hangouts itself is not being retired (thankfully), the API is.

Google shithole

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former Google employee, I can only laugh at this.

Throw one more on the pile. There's literally thousands more where it came from.

That company is absolutely infested with self-important assholes who all think they're the next big SV hot shit. Nobody wants to maintain anything and no documentation is kept up, because the brilliant geniuses hired out of college to make it all moved up or out three months later after shitting their half-assed garbage out in a flurry of sick buzzwords so impressive that nobody wanted to admit they didn't know what the fuck was being said.

Re:Google shithole

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. We've tried to work with google on 2 separate projects. Each time every engineer that has had to work with them has said how full of themselves every single one of them has been. There is no compromise, and god forbid you ever bring up an issue or something could be an issue in the future. Everything from them is the way something should be done, and you are doing it wrong and must conform. Even though they will be scrapping what you just tried to interface with because it was so horribly designed and unmaintainable by some 'rockstar' google coder that the project couldn't continue and will just be scrapped for another haphazard api later

Re:Google shithole

[Anonymous Coward]

After working with many of their APIs, I have to agree. I call them an 80% company. The people there get excited about doing something, do the 80% easy part, then bail out on handling the edge cases and making it robust and actually a functioning product. So on the surface, what you are looking sounds like just what you want, and even getting the happy path might be fine, but it isn't too far down the road before you find functions missing definitions, or even giant use cases completely neglected.

Roll 20

[Grimpen]

How will this effect Roll20? That's what I used Hangouts for mostly, much better than the Roll20 native chat. Hangouts was always a decent cross platform video chat.

Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google

[the_Bionic_lemming]

These days it's hard to write anything non-trivial without relying on something that will be hard to replace if it goes away, that's just a reality of modern software design.

Umm, no, it isn't.

Learn how to write a web page without using api from other sources. Don't use javascipt links.

WRITE YOUR OWN CODE!

It's pure lazy to use 3rd party links. If you can't code without the crutches, then at least admit you're handicapped.

Why do they keep doing this?

[bistromath007]

Google's development strategy:

10 Get everybody using a new thing
20 Get it working well enough that they're finally used to it
30 GOTO 10

Just fix the shit you already made. You do not need two or three parallel solutions for every service you want to attempt to provide.

Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google

[Anne Thwacks]

You design your code so you can switch between payment providers at a moment's notice (to avoid risk of rates becoming uncompetitive, or other unreasonable conditions).

And you use an OSS database to avoid Oracle^H^H^H^H^H being shafted/crushed/hung-drawn-and-quartered. If they get borked, at least they can always be forked - and others will be in the same boat.

Why Google Hangouts didn't get used

[Applehu Akbar]

Because everyone knows that any Google side project is subject to being suddenly abandoned with minimal notice.