What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore.
Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them.
Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the new Hangouts features". It's sad.
Sean Eagen is the more or less single person behind a LOT of that work. If you've ever used GAIM/Pidgin, you've used his work. Sadly, he was hired by google to work on libjingle, their XMPP video standard. Then he went on to work on google talk and now I believe google maps, but I've not looked him up in eons.
There are just too many different proprietary IM protocols, and they are often fast moving targets. You can't keep up with a team of Google engineers tweaking their protocol every day.
Have a look at WhatsApp, there was a bunch of efforts to reverse engineer their protocol, and they ended up non-working, abandoned or C&Ded [0]
Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them.
Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the new Hangouts features". It's sad.