Google maps was always very buggy for me on Android, but fine on iOS.
Hangouts is bad. Very slow and bloated everywhere. On mobile it only syncs notifications at random. Audio and video quality is total crap, and even with this new web beta thing where it's supposed to be better, it's still much worse than skype.
The most incredible thing, and I am ashamed of typing this but whatever, is that I've actually felt an improvement in my life after turning off hangouts in gmail. WTF.
Fine, but I wish they'd stop breaking some of the core features in hangouts. Since fairly recently, non google users are unable to get into video hangouts via new-style (non /_/calendar/) google calendar created links. Uberconference integration doesn't consistently work. Screenshare (since the plugin was phased out) doesn't work in chromium/ubuntu, but does in firefox. I've reported all of these issues in the product forums, but haven't seen resolution on any of them.
I know google isn't "into QA", but for such a core product it's remarkably flaky.
As long as it crashes less and makes their (woefully unstable) Chrome Boxes need to be re-imaged/restored less... I'll take it.
Hangouts is nice when it works but it's become something of a swear word at my work - even if it makes setting up a conference in a meeting room a lot easier.
<b>Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell</b>
My S4 updated from gtalk to hangouts, and I loathe it. It now crashes quite regularly, sometimes multiple times in a single chat session, and included a stupid button that starts a video chat on my phone, a feature I have never wanted and never will want, but manages to get fat-thumbed, or randomly turn itself on when I am trying to communicate with someone.
Hangouts is a good piece of tech and the has a great UX with minimal UI. The only issues with hangouts are that:
1. It is a resource hog. Laptops spit fire when they run hangouts for more than 10 minutes
2. It can be buggy and unreliable. Almost every 3rd hangout meeting, someone on my team is unable to hear others or is unable to use the mic. Fix can range anything between restarting the computer to killing audio processes.
In my experience, it is much less reliable on OS X than Linux.
If they manage to make it reliable and reduce resource usage, it'll be the perfect video conference app.
Also, it doesn't currently work on firefox which is a pain.
Hangouts crashes all the time on my Nexus 6P. Video calls are buggy and any interaction with photos is extremely sluggish. This has been going on for months and months.
And the name is stupid. When I used to encourage people to use Hangouts, I always had to explain the name. Talk is a great name and they should have gone back to it for Allo.
The Skype app for Android and Linux were so bad that I stopped using Skype completely. I thought that Hangouts was going to be a perfect replacement, but the notifications became too unreliable. If anyone from Google is reading my comments, and would like ideas on how to fix it, send me a message. I do want Hangouts to work. :)
Hangouts didn't work for a long time on Firefox. They fixed it around a month ago or so, but that's pretty much three years after they knew that this problem would arise (deprecation of NPAPI plugins in Firefox).
For other parts, for example GMail, I've heard that they don't work as well on Firefox.
And to some degree, this is also just what I expect to see more of in the future, as outside of G Suite they're not exactly known for treating other browsers well either. Android Firefox in particular gets bullied by Google a lot. Last time I checked, the Google Custom Search that webpages can embed, just straight up returned a 404 when contacted by a browser with Android Firefox user-agent. And they serve some age-old version of google.com to it.
I doubt the camera-reboot issue on the 4 will ever get fixed, either.
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