Contact Google Chat Support

Hello there, let me start this by first saying that I haven’t used gchat all that much so maybe I’m not quite used to all it’s features yet but I think no matter what my point will stand: hangouts was better. I can’t frankly think of a reason why google would take something that had been used for so long and was very effective and completely change it, especially now when people are relying on online chatting platforms even more. I have used hangouts for 6 years and have never had any complaint with them, my school used it profusely for contact between teachers and students (as well as between students for group projects and clubs). Relating to this, a club I am a part of that heavily relied on hangouts as a way to communicate meeting times and important information is now struggling to figure out how to use gchat the same way - again, we haven’t used gchat that much so maybe we’re missing an important feature, but if it was truly that important it should have been more obvious to know.

The app is clunky when trying to send pics. There is a see delayed repsonse time from when you upload a picture. The send button starts to spin like it is thinking if it should upload your pic. When the send button is available after the spinning. Then you're able to send the pic. After 3-4 minutes, that's when you find out if your picture has sent or not. It doesn't show you trying to send the pic as a preview in the chat thread like it would for hangouts to let you know that is trying to send but can't for unforseen reasons. Instead, the person on the other end of the chat asks if you ever going to send the pic. When looking on my end, after 7 minutes has passed, then I receive a small message asking if I want to resend or delete. This need to be fixed. It's frustrating and my friends and family are experiencing the same issues.

Google Chat is lackluster compared to previous iterations of Google communication tools, and here's why: 1) Chat can only send ONE picture at a time and there is significant lag before your client updates to display that you've sent a picture, so multiple repeat pictures are common in threads because you don't know if it actually sent. 2) Video calls are seriously stupid. You send a "Google Meet" link into the thread, which other users have to click to join a separate call. This is absolutely senseless compared to the incredible ease we had with Hangouts. Members of my family have missed out on precious moments and announcements because of this. 3) No SMS integration. 4) gifs are hit or miss and some device clients only play the gif once. 5) Not P2P encrypted. Pretty sure Allo had all of this and more, and it worked beautifully, until it was deprecated in favor of trash like this. Why in the world do we keep going backwards!?! I don't know why Google feels the need to make their user base constantly change apps to keep up with basic communication functionality. From Hangouts to Allo to Hangouts to Duo to Hangouts to Chat. I'd just like a stable and secure P2P encrypted application to use where I can video chat, send pictures (yeah, that’s multiple pictures AT ONCE), and text.