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

[shaitand]

Why? Does anyone actually bother with voice/video anymore? It's nice to know those features are there but basically hangouts was just the annoying replacement for google chat and it is a handy IM app that neither requires me to find someone on Facebook nor requires me to use my phone when I'm sitting at a real keyboard. Also it supports group messaging... my work peers and eye have kept a "hangout" open for a few years now for comments when we aren't officially available at work and things we'd rather not say in our official work im.

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.

"hazards of developing using a third party"

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the hazards of relying on Google for anything. They throw stuff away constantly.

Re:"hazards of developing using a third party"

[thegarbz]

No for the most part they throw away unpopular things off little interest. Chances are if you're using this API you can manage the complaints you get from both of your customers.

Re:"hazards of developing using a third party"

[Big Hairy Ian]

And then there's google site search which only about 25% of the inter-web uses. That get decommissioned later this year but at least they gave us advanced warning and also they are replacing it. It's just that it's scheduled to be removed before the replacement comes online.

Re:"hazards of developing using a third party"

[shaitand]

"Perspective is something for people who are making assumptions. Google doesn't need perspective, they have analytics."

Analytics have to be interpreted... through a lens of perspective. I was looking at a cpu usage graph today... someone pointed out a huge spike and asked for an explanation... the graph scaled automatically so the massive spike was only a 5% usage increase on a system that was mostly idle and created the illusion of a massive spike because a measly 5% was massive relative to the variance over the rest of the period in the graph. Even a graph can have perspective.

Google's perspective could lead to cutting something that costs them next to nothing to maintain and has hundreds of thousands or even millions of users because that is peanuts compared to gmail... their "graph" has scaled in the opposite direction making such usage look like a tiny blip.

Analytics are a bunch of data, you can spin them, twist them, and interpret/misinterpret them in so many ways they are very nearly useless. I leave pretending nearly meaningless correlations are extremely valuable hard data to poor bastards who have to convince the non-technical idiot decision makers and advertising con men.

It happens, but way too commonly with google

[Anrego]

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. You can minimize the risk with abstraction and try to rely on open standards with multiple implementations, but at some point you have to just accept the occasional puzzle piece change as part of the business and move on.

That said, google pulls this shit all the time. Using a google API or service for anything critical would imo be a huge risk given their long history of suddenly killing things.

Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google

[Dutch Gun]

While I don't expect Google to realistically support every failed project forever, every product or service they kill reinforces the notion that "the cloud" simply means "services you rent which can be arbitrarily shut down at any time by the company who actually owns them."

There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides. And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.

Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google

[Anrego]

There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides.

Agree entirely. It's a risk and business management decision as much as a technical one. Relying on 3rd party services is obviously (or hopefully obviously) a risk, but risk is a basic component of most business.

Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google

[Anrego]

I've been involved in refactoring lots of software to replace dependencies on dead or obsolete tools and libraries, some of which were very expensive. Open source projects stagnate and die, but businesses go bankrupt, shift directions and discontinue products if they become unprofitable.

Determining the stability of a product and the impact to your business if it goes away is (or should be) part of the business decision process.

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.

Re: It happens, but way too commonly with google

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud is the deathknell of everything a personal computer used to stand for. We used to have our own files and programs, we were the masters. Now we're merely the tenants, paying rent every so often, our devices and apps beleaguered by ads and other bullshit.

RMS had it correct, but idk if he predicted our trojan horses wouldn't exactly come from the Microsofts of the world initially... but from hardware makers concocting a new type of computer (smartphone) which in turn inflicted the rest of the market with this shit mentality.

Re:It happens, but way too commonly with google

[im_thatoneguy]

And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.

I don't see many people developing, deploying and maintaining a video chat service for less than the occasional hassle of changing providers who use a sane API. Integration should be incredibly simple and inexpensive. You could have many dozen Google Hangout type services shutter and still save time and money over developing it and hosting it in-house.

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.

Re: It happens, but way too commonly with google

[dnaumov]

Turns out most people out there DO NOT WANT a "personal computer" in the way you and I understand it. They consider it too much trouble and effort.

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.

Once again

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Once again Google fucks people over, people who've spent a lot of time and energy building shit to work with their system.

The motto of this story is, "Work with Google and you'll get abandoned whenever they feel like it."

Re:Once again

[thegarbz]

Or maybe Google is closing something that is used so little that most developers who have put time and effort into it have written it off as a failure long ago.

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.

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:Why do they keep doing this?

[slyborg]

Why is this still complex for people after 15+ years? Google's business is selling ads to an audience made captive by "free" email and search (I include Maps here) paid for by the privacy of that audience. The rest of what they do is wanking because they have more money than they know what to do with, the incremental info they get from most of these projects is nil. Google "strategy" these days is to make an inferior copy of other people's ideas, try to leverage their captive audience by strong-arming them and then failing anyway. People have been ripping on Apple lately, but Google is in exactly the same "no-innovation" spiral. They are ripe for disruption, it is only a matter of time.

Re:Why do they keep doing this?

[swb]

It's so funny how companies like Google or Microsoft or even Apple never seem to get really good at anything beyond what they're good at.

Apple managed to reinvent itself from computer company to mostly a smartphone maker, Google managed to do search/advertising and Android, and Microsoft managed Windows/Office/SQL but at the end of the day they just can't overcome the internal inertia of these products and become more than that.

Microsoft at least has the path to Azure, but it's really the same products sold as timesharing. Google throws money at everything, but even where things seem to sort of stick (ChromeOS) they never gain real traction.

Down with big business... lingo

[JaredOfEuropa]

"Going forward"? What's wrong with "from now on", or "soon", or simply leaving that little bit off completely since it conveys zero information? I know business people like the term "going forward" because it sounds both positive and purposeful, but it's such an ugly turn of phrase when tacked on to the end of a statement like that.

Re:Down with big business... lingo

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a more sophisticated "er" or "um". That said, it should be destroyed.

Re: Decent cross platform video chat?

[NotAPK]

But for family get togethers they are perfect. My family tried most video conferencing programs and eventually settled on Hangouts as the easiest for the oldies to handle. Google screwed us with the new G+ interface last year, as they dropped (or hid it so well none of us could find it) the Hangouts tools and we had to migrate everyone to hangouts.google.com to get going again.

Anyone able to suggest an alternative?

We need it to be cross platform, as we have a dozen family members on 3 continents using different systems, and "good enough" for us to see the babies, tell some jokes, and just catch up. Suggestions more than welcome!

Bait and switch

[jabberw0k]

Marketing: "Computers" are scary, let's call this computer a "telephone" (a device that only handles voice) and deceive folks into trusting our treacherous spy machines and paying us handsomely each month for the privilege.

Moron Consumers: "Ooh, shiny!"

wtf google

[wardrich86]

Why the hell are they pushing a feature-limited One-on-one app over Hangouts? Why couldn't they have just implemented the features of Duo into Hangouts to allow for higher-quality video chats during one-on-one calls?

Re: I use hangouts for chat between phone and PC

[Sperbels]

They aren't shutting down Hangouts. They're shutting down the API for 3rd parties that leverage it. If you use the Hangouts app on your phone you're fine.

Isn't that better? Excluding one word in your reply could have made you 100% less of a dick.