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A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps (2021)
Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess.
But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today. The lack of any kind of draft mode meant you didn't have a free second to compose your thoughts into text or think about what you wanted to type—every letter was immediately broadcast onto the Internet, showing the world your typing speed and error rate. If you can't tell from the standard's 13-year-old origins, the rollout of RCS is best mapped out on a geologic time scale, with carriers occasionally paying lip service to upgrading SMS but doing very little in terms of actual action.
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