> Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine.
For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.
You'll need to explain that, I genuinely don't know what you say it.
Facetime is just a feature. It's a calling option in contacts and any phone call to another iPhone can be turned into a facetime call at the push of a button. That means you don't even need to think about it. There's no install process, no configuration, no account to set up, it's just there.
Furthermore because it can rely on guaranteed hardware features it has the best compression, bandwidth utilization and image quality in the business. If it's a joke, I'm not sure who it is that's doing the laughing.
It is a service, I don't see why it being integrated into some other app should matter.
It works for calling people who bought from the same brand as you, it doesn't work for the rest of people, and it pretends to work (WTF?) for people who used to have the same brand as you.
That's a very different bar from just needing to install an application.
there is an account and you do need to be signed into it in settings. if you don't sign in when you setup the phone, you separately need to sign into: app store, icloud, imessage, facetime, etc
When it comes to shitty interoperability, Google takes the cake.
No one ever claimed FaceTime works on your android. They wanted to open source it and got fucked on patents.
Try using gmail to send a regular iCalendar format invite to an event. If they just happen to have used that email for a google account, fuck you it ends up in the Google calendar account they likely didn't know they even had, and never goes to their email.
THAT is unexpected, and arguably deceptive behaviour.
Jobs said it at the keynote when FaceTime was announced. They never managed to follow through, and ultimately had to change the way FaceTime works, because of a lawsuit by a patent troll.
But they did do the work to circumvent the patent. "Patents" can't logically be the reason FaceTime isn't an open standard today. I doubt they ever were. Apple simply realized that FaceTime was an effective sales driver for iOS hardware and wanted to keep that competitive advantage more than they wanted to follow through on Jobs's promise.
The patents forced them to route through their own servers instead of peer to peer. Seems like a logical reason not to make that an open standard to me.
Couldn't they have made it an open standard and required an account with them to communicate with their users? An open standard would have resulted in cross-platform clients.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I've read that they actively shutdown or circumvent projects to create other clients. If they really didn't consider it a strategic asset to push people to iOS I doubt they'd bother with that.
I think there are plausible reasons that could have changed their plans for them. Who knows if they would have actually followed through with the original plan or what their true reasons are. I don't know. That they changed their implementation to relay all video through their servers is known. They said so in court.
I guess they could be saying that they don't want to run servers for competitors to connect to, but under patent law, there's clearly nothing preventing them from doing so.
[Here lies a substantive question that was posed to a content-free comment. Edit lasts longer than delete, so you now get to read its depressingly gray tombstone. Let's reflect together on this.]
That's a very strong defense of a piece of software that deliberately prevents you from communicating with people that haven't bought the same piece of electronics.
Think on that for a moment - "Sorry grandmama, I can't send you iMessage or talk to you in person since you didn't spend your pension on an expensive Apple device."
For something as fundamental as human-to-human communication, closed, single vendor, protocols and systems deserve every criticism (and yes, Google deserves it as well).
In theory...in reality when it comes to Apple HN crowd has double standards (eg. see snarky comment on "closing date" at top and try to imagine such a comment on Apple not being downvoted here)
I started using it lot more in the past year, mainly since it hits every platform my kids, parents, and ex use. Which is all of them, at any given moment. Being the family techie, I was the only one to note that we were virtually limited to 1 or 2 choices.
For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.