![]() But now, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet will also be consumer products - that'll somehow exist alongside Messages and Duo to serve more or less the same basic purposes, while ostensibly being built to serve a completely different role. ![]() Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet are the enterprise equivalents for team communication. So, to put all that together, here in 2020, Messages and Duo are the consumer apps for text and video communication. On its Hangouts help page, Google says it's "fully committed to supporting classic Hangouts users until everyone is successfully migrated to Chat and Meet" and that it plans to "transition users from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet after June 2020." Not thoroughly befuddled yet? Hang on, 'cause here comes the real icing on the messy messaging cake: Google also now says it intends to make Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet - y'know, the enterprise-aimed, team-oriented parts of that chart we were talking about a second ago - available for consumer users as well. The company's latest word is that it'll end support for that old version of Hangouts among G Suite users sometime late this year but that it'll continue to support the consumer version of "classic" Hangouts for the foreseeable future. First, Google still hasn't officially committed to any specific timeframe for when it'll shut down the on-life-support and hanging-on-by-a-thread "classic" Hangouts service - a service that's still integrated into the Gmail website, where it's confusingly referred to simply as "Chat" in the site's settings (and colloquially referred to as "GChat" by most average users). For the first time in as long as I could remember, Google had a sensible plan for its messaging apps - with a small number of services serving carefully defined roles. If you let yourself forget about the lingering existence of the "classic" Hangouts app for a minute, that simplified strategy makes an awful lot of sense: Messages and Duo were to handle text-based chatting and video-oriented communications, respectively, on the consumer side, while Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet would do the same for G-Suite-subscribing enterprise teams. A vocal member of the company's messaging team explained that vision on Twitter at the time: TwitterĬlick the image to view the full original tweet. Google even started pulling pieces out of the original Hangouts in advance of its impending doom, but no one knew exactly how or when that app would go away.Įven so, Google at least seemed to have a clear vision for its messaging empire - something that had been sorely lacking for years. Those apps were destined to replace the old "classic" Hangouts service we all knew and loved, despite the fact that they really had very little to do with what the original Hangouts had represented. Those were the confusingly named Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet services - the business-aimed pair of communication apps we just mentioned. Hangouts, the formerly universal cross-platform messaging service once billed as the "big fix" for Google's messaging mess, was hanging around and sitting in a strange state of limbo: The previous spring, in 2017, Google had announced it was "evolving" Hangouts into two totally new, enterprise-focused services. Now, mind you, things were still a little murky. With that distraction out of the way, we were told, Google would focus its efforts solely on a single set of messaging and video chatting apps for consumers and a single set of matching products for business teams. Back then, y'see, Google announced it was "pausing" all work and investments in Allo, the A.I.-injected chat service it had launched with lots of fanfare and little sense of purpose two years prior. That sentiment started a little over a year ago, in December of 2018. ![]() For a minute there, I thought Google might have actually been on its way to a clear and sensible strategy for its mess of messaging services. ![]()
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