Yesterday, Google unveiled its unified chat service called Hangouts for Android, iOS, & the web. Looks like history is repeating itself. It would appear that AT&T doesn’t trust its subscribers to the amount of data they might use during video chats. Slash Gear discovered that if you are using an Android device on AT&T’s network and trying to use the video chat feature on Hangouts, you were greeted with a message stating: “You must be connected to a Wi-Fi network to join a video call.” While iOS users had no problems connected.
AT&T had this to say about the matter:
All AT&T Mobility customers can use any video chat app over cellular that is not pre-loaded on their device, but which they download from the Internet. For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we offer all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share, Tiered and soon Unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices. It’s up to each OS and device makers to enable their systems to allow pre-loaded video chat apps to work over cellular for our customers on those plans.
According to this generic statement, there is some miscommunication between AT&T and Google. Google never requested for the carrier to allow Hangouts to work over cellular or AT&T is being picky about what services they will allow to soak up data on their network. Either way, until this is resolved that means no real Hangouts for Android users. When it should be the other way around where iOS users are having trouble.
Just last year the carrier blocked its customers not using their Mobile Share plans from using FaceTime over cellular. But the issue was resolved months later. Hopefully this can get resolved a bit quicker.
Have any AT&T customers had any problems using video chat on Hangouts from their Android device?
via SlashGear
