It's unfortunate because Hangouts is still really awesome. It works really well for video chat (including group chat), but more importantly it works great with multiple devices. I can get a message on my phone, laptop or PC, and reply anywhere, with the conversation and notifications synchronized. I nearly always have my phone with me, but it's really nice to be able to just send someone a link from my PC, for example.
It looks like Telegram has multi-device support, but then this kind of thing scares me:
> Q: How are you going to make money out of this?
> We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.
> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and finance developer salaries. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram.
That's not very compelling in terms of investing my effort to switch.
It looks like Telegram has multi-device support, but then this kind of thing scares me:
> Q: How are you going to make money out of this?
> We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.
> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and finance developer salaries. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram.
That's not very compelling in terms of investing my effort to switch.