An ode to Google Hangouts

This was posted first, and this one a bit later.

Google Hangouts still works in Android 2.3, albeit without audio and video. That is, when Google Play Services and the Hangouts app are as up-to-date as possible within Gingerbread, and when a user bypasses the upgrade notification with the hardware menu button long-press.

Hangouts also works on Android 4.1, and presumably, on 4.0, too. While I have tried data-based audio/video on Hangouts once or twice, then audio/video do not seem to work on any of these versions of Android. (This could be due to having older hardware that is no longer capable of modern IP-based audio/video calls.)

Unlike Skype, Hangouts is to me the only reliable native app that works across Android 2.3-4.1 and beyond. The web-based Hangouts interface is much faster than that of Skype for Web.

I give huge props to Google for supporting Hangouts on older Android versions this far, though I do not know for how long this kind of support will last, as there is a slowish migration currently going on towards Google Chat.

The current version of Google Chat is meant only for G Suite customers (so far), and it requires Android 5.0, leaving users of older Android versions in the lurch. Chat does not transfer messages and contacts over from Hangouts, and reviews for Chat are poor.

After Hangouts, the second-best service with long-term support for older devices and operating systems is WhatsApp, though I do not use it. WhatsApp supported Nokia's S40-based phones up until the end of 2018. WhatsApp support on Android 2.3.7 stopped on February 1, 2020.

Unfortunately, Skype doesn't work reliably in Android 4.1, so I cannot use it in any capacity. Its main web-based version is extremely slow in mobile browsers of old devices (think anything with 512 Mb RAM), and official Skype snap-ins are also quite slow.