Google Hangouts is slated for death today. The phone app has been launching people individually from the service since July, but the last vestiges of Hangouts, the web app, are shutting down today.
For a brief period, Hangouts was Google’s best, most ambitious, and most popular messaging effort, but 5 billion downloads later, Google continues. Hangout relatives, Google Chat, should have all your messages and contacts automatically imported by now, but the new service is only a shadow of the original Hangouts plan.
The Hangouts shutdown is the latest chapter in the mess that is Google’s messaging history. Google Talk was launched 17 years ago and Google still doesn’t have a competing messaging platform. Part of the reason we use Google’s umpteenth messaging app is that there isn’t a solid, stable home for messaging within Google.
The 2022 message thread is a good example. The Google Workspace team makes Google Chat — that’s Google’s corporate team that makes a Slack competitor — and then there’s Google Messages, a carrier-centric kind of competitor to Apple’s iMessage that seemingly sprang from the Android team. Is the team that makes Android more or less important than the team that makes Gmail and the rest of the Google apps? Both have their understandable reasons for chasing posts, but splitting the Google user base across two incompatible products makes it difficult for both projects to gain traction. In addition to those two big projects, there’s also Google Voice and a lot of silo messaging services in apps like Google Photos and Google Pay.
Google once tried to fix this situation. Messaging had to have a real home at Google, and that home had to be Google+ (with dramatic thunderclap). In 2011, then-Google CEO Larry Page decided that social was the future and launched the Google+ project across the company. The head of G+ was given the title “Senior Vice President,” making him one of eight people to report directly to Page, anchoring Google+ as one of Google’s main pillars. This division would become wholly owned by messaging and two years later it launched its messaging project, Google+ Hangouts.
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The Android app from day one.
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Blob emojis and an ongoing video call.
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Would you believe Android had tablet apps?
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Like Google Talk, Hangouts also worked in Gmail.
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Who could forget the ugly, puke green version of Hangouts that launched in 2014?
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By the end of 2014, you could quickly switch between Hangouts, SMS, and Google Voice by just tapping the button to the left of the input field.
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The current (and, I think, final) design for Android.
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Hangouts, codenamed ‘Project Babel’, was entrusted with the task of – get this –unifying Google’s messaging portfolio. At the time, Google had four messaging apps: Google+ Messenger, Google Talk, Android’s texting app, and Google Voice. Hangouts launched in 2013 and had integrated text messaging by the end of the year. In 2014, the app was fully operational and featured Hangouts messaging, SMS, and Google Voice all in one app, all available from your phone or anywhere on the web. With the release of Android 4.4 in 2013, there is used to be not a standalone android texting app. Hangouts was the only default texting option.
Google had built its iMessage clone and it was an incredible service. All your communication was available through one messaging app in one easy-to-use interface. Google also had tangible advantages over iMessage, thanks to its wide cross-platform compatibility. Hangouts was on Android, iOS, the web, and in Gmail. That meant at one point the service worked natively on phones, watches, cars, tablets, web browsers, and even Google Glass. Google would probably have a good footing in messaging today if it just kept updating and investing in Hangouts.
