As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 halfhearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011. If Google has anyone to blame for the iMessage's dominance, it should start with itself, since it has continually sabotaged and abandoned its own plans to make an iMessage competitor.

Messaging is important, and even if it isn't directly monetizable, a dominant messaging app has real, tangible benefits for an ecosystem. The rest of the industry understood this years ago. Facebook paid $22 billion to buy WhatsApp in 2014 and took the app from 450 million users to 2 billion users. Along with Facebook Messenger, Facebook has two dominant messaging platforms today, especially internationally. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack in 2020, and Tencent's WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, is pulling in 1.2 billion users and yearly revenues of $5.5 billion. Snapchat is up to a $67 billion market cap, and Telegram is getting $40 billion valuations from investors. Google keeps trying ideas in this market, but it never makes an investment that is anywhere close to the competition. //

Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage in the past, called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse, which in addition to the native Hangouts messaging, also received SMS and Google Voice messages. Hangouts did group video calls five years before Zoom blew up, and it had clients on Android, iOS, the web, Gmail, and every desktop OS via a Chrome extension.

As usual though, Google lacked any kind of long-term plan or ability to commit to a single messaging strategy, and Hangouts only survived as the "everything" messenger for a single year. By 2016, Google moved on to the next shiny messaging app and left Hangouts to rot. //

Despite Google's whining about iMessage, it seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today, Google messaging is the worst and most fragmented it has ever been. As of press time, the company runs eight separate messaging platforms, none of which talk to each other: there is Google Messages/RCS, which is being promoted today, but there's also Google Chat/Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Photos Messages, Google Pay Messages, Google Maps Business Messages, Google Stadia Messages, and Google Assistant Messaging. Those last couple apps aren't primarily messaging apps but have all ended up rolling their own siloed messaging platform because no dominant Google system exists for them to plug into.

It is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015