https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/gmails-quick-reply-ui-brings-it-one-step-closer-to-instant-messaging/
The "Quick Reply" bar is basically an instant messaging interface.
not like Google has already tried and abandoned several instant messaging options over the years or anything …
At this point they could pay me per message and I wouldn't use it. I'm not goign to convince people to move just to be rug pulled again.
Move to an open, safe, user-respecting option like signal. Fuck using Google stuff for more than just this reason.
Instant Messaging, in particular, has been a series of failures of both vision and design by Google.
The golden opportunity was when Hangouts was the default SMS app on Android. The same technique has been very successful for Apple.
At the point they killed it, I do. It was an also-ran in the space with no strategy for growth. What I don't understand is why they caved to pressure from carriers for an SMS-only app as mentioned in the article, or why they keep trying to launch new chat apps that offer no unique value proposition.
It just doesn't make sense, it worked almost identically to apples iMessage when the person was also on Android, integrated nicely with Google Voice, had a web interface and they could have just implemented RCS, instead they made allo/duo, killed those off and now we have messages, which is fine but is just sms and RCS... Just seemed like such a waste of effort to do all of that when you already had a working product with integrations already built out.
Google is infamous for allowing valuable products to wither and die for no externally apparent reason. Hangouts, more than most was a major strategic error in my opinion.
Of course if they hadn't screwed it up third-party messaging options might be even less popular, and that would be unfortunate.
"Apple, please 😢, adopt rcs. We failed at our messaging apps😭now we need your help. EU, please tell apple to open up imessage 😟. It's so unfair. If you don't we'll add instant messaging to Gmail"
Most miserable company ever.
This and many other reasons not to use their products. I think more people would appreciate paying $5 or so a month for email that works without ads or invasions of privacy, in addition to avoiding the constant adjustments to Google-style ****ery.
finallly what google has been missing, an instant messenger application/protocol.
thanks google for really finding a gap and filling a need.
Google Talk, Google Chat, Google Huddle... Some of them even integrated with Gmail.
Seems like a dumb idea to try again, when already established chat systems that won't vanish in a year exist.
Also Allo, I used to use that app, it was very clean, but no one I talked to heard of it
I feel like everyone who knew enough to know about Allo was also acutely aware that Google would probably kill it, and it would really suck to move friends to an app that’s just gonna join the graveyard with the dozen others
Makes sense, I just got my first android and that happen to be the app that Google was promoting heavily at the time
No, it came after Google Talk (XMPP) and was in fact based on the same protocol. The new thing it brought was live updates, so you could see other people typing, and it also had different types of content, not just text.
I'm so fucking tired of companies trying to "innovative." Just give me my shitty government provided email service already so I can ignore it like I do snail mail
Just what a successful Google service needs, to be associated with the failure that is their messaging platform attempts.
This is a feature available in outlook desktop application at least for Mac
The irony is of course that Gmail did used to be essentially an instant messenger until Google decided in their wisdom that on Android you should not be notified immediately you receive a message
This is what I was wondering...the "chat" and "spaces" functions are already fully integrated into Gmail and are instant messaging. We used them extensively at my previous place of work. The article seems to be more about Google incentivizing chat-like responses to emails, which would be awful.
Will they succeed in making even Gmail fail?
I can already see memes with the Gmail icon and the obvious "task failed successfully"
You can react to emails with emoji right now. At least on Android.
Which at first I thought "thAts fucking dumb"
But now I can react 👍 instead of sending stupid, loathsome 'Thanks!' emails.
But what happens if someone sends you an email from a non-gmail account? Can you react then?
If so, does it just reply to this email with an emoji in the body? Cause then you're basically just replying in the exact way as before, google just added a quick-reply button with a predefined body.
I'm personally not a fan of nonstandard functionality for something as ubiquitous as email. Email should be exactly the same regardless of the client that's used.
Assuming this is aimed at business use: good, but too little too late.
Tacking on chat features isn't going to bring businesses back from Slack and Teams. The ship has sailed. Email exists as a lowest common denominator and a way for lead generators to harass people who don't actually make procurement decisions.
Email won't die but it's on indefinite LTS.
hahah thats exactly what this is. they got caught with their pants down on slack and now theyll never get market share.
The bit that kills me is that “make Google Chat not suck” doesn’t seem to be in the list of options for addressing this problem at all. I work for a company that uses GSuite and chat is universally loathed with a bunch of Slack instances running around the company, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. If they spent time working to improve chat, the momentum of being a GSuite company would carry the rest of the weight here. It doesn’t have to be better than Slack, just closer.
I mean that it's no longer actively being improved as a competitor to other forms of communication. Chat has taken over the world in both personal and business settings.
It's not going to die because it's the de facto default when nothing else is available, but it's also not going to rise up and compete with modern chat solutions which are already ten times as feature rich and continuing to evolve.
It's not meant to, I think it is perfect for the role it fills. I see it as thriving at what it set out to do, neither on life support nor struggling to maintain its achieved identity.
Always trying to improve things is often a very real problem. Email, like so many other things should have been, is best left as is.
(PS I did not downvote your comment)
I'm not arguing that it's meant to, I'm arguing that Google's attempts to add features to it to try and compete as a chat operations solution is futile.
Email being on LTS is fine, as I said, it'll never go away. That doesn't mean we have to dress it up in chat bubbles and emoji reactions under the pretense that it's something more than that.
XMPP/Jabber says hello. Remember how they used it but didn't want to allow you to use another Jabber client?
What's the problem with that? You can reply to any mail at your convenient time. It is not a telephone call.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last month the popular webmail app shipped an emoji reactions bar in the mobile app, where a single tap would send a new email with your emoji response.
Now, a wild new UI experiment spotted by Android Police goes another step further: a quick reply bar that looks just like instant messaging input.
Rather than the usual input block you get for writing paragraphs of overly formal text, this new Gmail experiment has a one-line input bar at the bottom for replies.
An "expand" button will presumably launch the usual compose interface.
So far, this seems to be an extremely rare test that only one person has gotten, so it will not necessarily roll out to everyone.
Given the recent emoji launch, though, Gmail certainly seems jealous of its instant-messaging cousins.
The original article contains 171 words, the summary contains 131 words. Saved 23%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The only reason I use Gmail at this point is because it's the only Android email client that has an actually nice, modern looking UI, other apps like K9 mail don't really look as nice as it.
It's annoying how they try to integrate Google chat into the app as well.
anyone remember googles inbox app? now that was basically perfect and had no ads but they killed it
I know it might not look very modern but K9 mail is the most clutter free no bs email client I've ever used.