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1/ When talking about Google's messaging strategy, discussions often get confusing because of the difference between what a product is *for* vs. who has *access to* a product. @juberti does a good job simply outlining who our apps are *for* here:
2/ Google has two types of accounts, std Google Accounts (sometimes called consumer, free, or gmail accounts, let's use GA), and G Suite accounts. GA accounts have (or will have) access to Duo, Messages, Chat, and Meet. G Suite accounts the same, provided the admin allows.
3/ (Technically Google Accounts already have access to Meet because they can join any meeting created by a G Suite account. But that isn't full access because GAs can't create video meetings in Meet yet. That will change in the future.)
4/ So in conflating *for* & *access to*, it quickly escalates to "YOU HAVE MULTIPLE APPS DOING THE SAME THING," and often there is some mention of Wave 😀. But our apps are built for very different use cases. When I travel and want to video with my family, I don't need an agenda.
5/ The other area that can make this confusing is the overlap of functionality. Families/friends and teams often need the same constructs to effectively communicate. We see similar features in each and start to wonder why this isn't ONE APP. And don't get me wrong, it could be.
6/ In fact, many others have taken this route of a single app for all. But going with a single app for different personas comes w/ costs and complexity. It forces you to make more general design decisions that work for both instead of target specific situations.
7/ For example, Chat has strict compliance requirements to meet the needs of our business customers. These same requirements don't apply to Messages. Or, there are different privacy constraints for people working together in an organization vs. an app used by the general public.
8/ Then we get to the WHY SO MANY APPS discussion. Like why Chat, Meet, and Voice, instead of one Hangouts ChatMeetVoice app (we are very literal in our naming at Google). We made this decision because all of our research and data suggest people prefer purpose built apps.
9/ Voice is a perfect example of a purpose built app. It is a phone. In the cloud. The majority of our users tell us when they want to make or pickup a call, they want to go to a dedicated phone app, not flip through a slew of UIs in a single app. They want to use a phone.
10/ We also have to support configs where our customers are not using all of our products. Some may use Meet but not our calendar (I know, crazy). Or Meet and Calendar, but not Chat (I can't think of any high profile alternatives, but maybe someone can. 😆).
11/ I am *not* saying this couldn't be done w/ one app, just that it has trade-offs. I'm not trying to assign fault for why this is confusing (likely ours). I'm also not trying to rationalize historical decision making. I'm just trying to outline how I think about it now. /FIN
