> They never dropped XMPP from Talk, they just never implemented it in Hangouts.
ISTR that they did back off of XMPP support in Google Talk to some extent a bit before that last move. Something about not allowing incoming connection requests from non-Google accounts by default IIRC.
> Don't take my word too heavily, as this was just what I saw in a quick test with one Gmail account of my own.
XMPP support with Hangouts is currently very, very weird. Even though they shut down the old Google Talk service, and they say everywhere that Hangouts and XMPP don't mix, I'm still able to sign in to the service using XMPP (via Pidgin) and communicate with other Gmail users. No federation here, just directly signing in.
I'm waiting for it to eventually just stop working, just as MSN kept their servers alive for a while after their formal end of support announcement and the Skype transition...
> Google was in a position to change all that when they adopted XMPP for Google Talk.
I'd add to that that if they considered XMPP inferior for whatever reason, they were in position to change it by opening up Hangouts like XMPP-next or whatever. They simply betrayed the whole effort.
- XMPP is deprecated as far as Google is concerned.
- Google Hangouts (non-XMPP) replaces Google Talk (XMPP) on Android.
- Apparently I always appear online in Google Hangouts even when I'm signed out of Google Talk leading to people messaging me and being confused that I don't respond, or never got the message (apparently it just goes into the aether, or maybe only shows up if I switch over the Google Hangouts).
Saying "look XMPP still works!" doesn't prove much as it's a second-class (or even third-class) citizen in Google's ecosystem.
Google Talk supports XMPP federation and has done so since January 2006. To deal with an onslaught of spam, Google disabled incoming subscription requests for a short time. During this time, all other XMPP federation features continued to work.
Hangouts does not use XMPP, but it's a feature that they didn't implement. It's not something that they disabled.
Google still didn't kill Talk which is XMPP conformant and even federated. But their Hangouts protocol is different and their Hangouts client doesn't use conformant XMPP. And since many users automatically got switched to it, they became cut off from their non Google XMPP contacts.
Hangout does not support XMPP, at all. Google Talk still does, but the Google Talk Android app was replaced by Hangouts, they're slowly replacing Talk with Hangout in Gmail, and it's quite likely Talk will be shut down altogether given Google's track record.
Google is moving away from XMPP everything. They recently deprecated all XMPP related services in their cloud suite. [1] The XMPP API will be permanently disabled October 31, 2017. Previously they've deprecated their Google Talk windows client, and said that they plan to focus their efforts on Hangouts. [2]
> How are you trying to do it? If I hit the search icon on the chat pane, I can type in a number and call from Google Voice. It opens a new Hangouts window, but that's what it's been doing for as long as I remember, and certainly the last year at least.
If you run your own XMPP server, you have to disable google Talk, which disables the calling from gmail (in addition to much more)
> chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk.
Hangouts chat came wayyyy after Google Talk or even its integration into gmail (I know, it's hard to keep track of the chronology of these Google services, they release 2 new ones a year)
ISTR that they did back off of XMPP support in Google Talk to some extent a bit before that last move. Something about not allowing incoming connection requests from non-Google accounts by default IIRC.
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