I honestly liked Hangouts way better than Chat. I sometimes don't get notifications that I have a new message or how many new messages I have. The view of the chat is too simple. I liked how their was a clear separation of messages (my messages on one side, then recipient(s) on the other side). More ability for personalization of the chat would be great.
Zero stars. Forced out of hangouts. Google chat is far less intuitive, infuriating, and extremely glitchy. Only about 20% of the images/files I attempted to send successfully go through. You cannot attach more than one image at a time, the spaces versus chat add extra steps to access your conversations and is clunky. I can no longer see who has viewed the message. Overall, I am beyond disappointed and frustrated with the chat platform and will be transitioning to a different platform asap.
Compared to Hangouts, we traveled about half the Earth's diameter in distance going backwards. Everything in Hangouts was simple, right in one area and easy to access. Now, everything is everywhere, and not to mention that core functions are missing, it's much slower, I rarely get notifications, and it's 20 times more tedious to use. And the fact that you're forced to switch from Hangouts makes this downgrade a waste of space on your phone. Use something else if you want a good messaging app.
Google Chat is the worst. I can't place my settings to see links in a web browser, I can't see all images in a chat and when I click on it the image is super huge and I can't adjust the size, I can't place more than one image or attachment at a time, I can't video call without creating a "team" or whatever that is. Please quit trying to be like Microsoft Teams or Zoom. It's just so many steps backwards from Hangouts. Bring Hangouts back!
Inferior in nearly every way to Hangouts. I can't figure out why some of my group chats are under "chats" and some are in "spaces," and am consequently always looking in the wrong one. The app also can't navigate to a Space from a push notification if the last thing you were reading was a Chat, and vice versa. Left-aligning everyone's text in a white background makes it very difficult to scan through conversations. The only improvement is that it seems to compress photos now for quicker sending.
Not a good replacement for Hangouts. If it were a near 1:1 experience, it would be fine, but now everyone's messages are on one side, you can't view pictures that well (thumbnail inadequate, selecting picture opens browser window). Poorly fleshed out, frankly. Microsoft Teams may not be great, but holy cow can they really take it to the users and get feedback. They know what to do. Google doesn't care. Time to find a new chat client.
I wish I could give it 0 stars. I don't understand why they wanted to change chats into a commercial like app. It's a wannabe Microsoft teams. I don't want to use a platform like that outside of work. Getting rid of the chat bubbles makes reading chats difficult. "history is on" displayed in the type field is very distracting. The stickers are gone. I am livid about this change. There are also no options for customization other than the background color. Thanks for ruining a good thing.
Hangouts was better. This chat feature really sucks. The way you send photos sucks. You can only send one at a time. And you can't click on a photo and scroll through what you've already sent. You have to keep scrolling up forever to find it in chat. Not to mention now the text us all on the same side which makes it confusing to figure out who typed what. And your messages muddle together. So when you send 2 messages it looks like one. This app sucks. I would not recommend.
Forced to use this because they blocked hangouts from working. It's worse. You can only attach one image at a time. It seems to struggle with sending/playing videos, but succeeds eventually. It splits chats between groups and individuals in different tabs for added time/clicks to access. There are probably other things, but the above is enough. It is simply worse than the app I am being forced to replace.
Works, but Hangouts was much better. As other reviewers have said, the lack of left/right chat bubbles isn't helpful. If someone sends a pic and I view it, then close it and re-open, it seems to have to re-download the pic, every time. I also cannot swipe to view previous pics in the chat. Then, it appears to be non-trivial to initiate a voice or video call with someone; but chat-in-gmail has that option right at the top, as did Hangouts. Overall, other posters were right, big step backwards.
