That history has been really sad from the Android side too, not just the users who can't chat together any more. In the first Android beta there were a lot of XMPP classes that were really powerful, if you had all the right permissions and the user had the other people friended and running the same app, you could fire system events (intents) right in the other app through them. But in the second beta the XMPP classes were renamed GoogleTalk classes, and then on release they were all taken away. Now every app has to include a huge smack lib to have even less power than they had in the beta.