The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It&#x27;s a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal.<p>In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one &quot;to reply&quot; list. A taste of what messaging could be.<p>I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn&#x27;t receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.<p>And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.<p>And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won&#x27;t let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can&#x27;t use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.<p>And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...<p>On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.<p>I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- &quot;I will never switch to a Google app!&quot;, they said.<p>What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)<p>EDIT: I don&#x27;t like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;CmdgUp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;CmdgUp</a>