this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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They slowly start it. When Google killed XMPP they also didn't do it within a week.
If Google killed XMPP, how come some enterprise communication products (off the top of my head I can name two that are successful at least in Europe) use it?
There is XMPP the protocol which is indeed still widely used by commercial entities, and there is XMPP the open federated network, also called Jabber, which is still alive but Google did kneecap it pretty hard back then.
XMPP as used in the enterprise communication product my employer uses (AFAIK based on the common open source implementation) sucks as much on mobile as Xabber which I used back in the day. I get notifications 30 minutes late if at all. That thing killed itself by not adapting to smartphones.
That's a bad implementation then. Modern open-source XMPP works great on mobile, no problems with notifications at all on Android. iOS is more of a mixed bag, but that is solely Apple's fault and applies to all messengers other than iMessage.
The issue was the state of mobile clients when XMPP died in the mainstream and state of the art was crap like Xabber. Conversations was better but too little, too late.
Telegram works flawlessly pretty much everywhere, including iOS which my mom uses.
Well, Monal on iOS doesn't work worse than Telegram on iOS, so then apparently it's flawless as well. I am not an iOS user, but I heard complaints about Telegram on iOS as well regarding notifications.
Again: The current state is irrelevant when discussing the time frame when Google allegedly killed it. The state of Jabber and its clients was just abhorrently bad back in the day. That was the reason the world moved to WhatsApp. Google Talk has always been a niche product. That's why it's dead.
It's not dead, and works fine. I am not disagreeing that it had a serious set-back but that's water down the river.
Also WhatsApp is using a slightly modified version of XMPP, so your argument is a bit funny :)
Obviously modified enough to work better with mobile when it launched than Jabber's state of the art back then.
Again: Google did not kill Jabber. Jabber achieved its downfall on its own by being bettered by proprietary services that just worked better on mobile devices BACK THEN.
Google Talk was never Jabber. The Google Jabber integration was way before that in Gmail. Google Talk was what came after Google decided to abandon Jabber.
And yes Google very much held Jabber back by having the largest user-base in their Gmail integration and refusing to even implement SSL for that let alone supporting any other innovations like better mobile support. If Google had actually supported Jabber instead of sabotaging it, we would not have this discussion.
Wikipedia says otherwise.
Google kills messaging services all the time and launches new, incompatible ones. Google did not sabotage Jabber, they sabotage their own chat services all the time.
Wikipedia is not a good source on this. By the time Google's XMPP based messaging product was renamed "Google Talk" it had long ceased to be compatible with the wider Jabber federation.
While I agree that Google does also sabotage their own messengers, it was deeply involved in XMPP specs development and other stuff around the ecosystem in the beginning, and then just quietly began to blockage urgently needed changes as they were unwilling to implement them in their system.
But I guess this discussion has reached the end of being useful as you clearly have a lack of understanding what actually happened back then.