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[Update: Store renames] Google trademarks ‘Google Meet’ and ‘Google Chat,’ support page backs change

Hangouts Chat

Hangouts Meet just got its much-needed rebrand to Google Meet amidst the surging popularity of videoconferencing tools in general. Alongside a trademark for that term, there’s another Hangouts product whose fate has yet to be decided. Hangouts Chat, the teams-focused Slack competitor from the Mountain View company, might also be getting a rebrand that does away with the troublesome Hangouts branding.


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Google details what’s next for Hangouts Chat: Guest access, Meet/Voice integration, PWA to replace Electron

Hangouts Chat

Google announced this morning that Hangouts Chat is coming to Gmail. That integration was teased earlier this year as one of the legacy features coming from classic Hangouts. At Cloud Next 2019, Google detailed public Guest access, Meet/Voice integration, and a Progress Web Apps to replace Electron clients.


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Hangouts Chat coming to Gmail as Hangouts Meet adds live captioning & public streams

Hangouts Chat for Gmail

This October, Google is retiring Hangouts “classic” for G Suite enterprise users. Ahead of that, a number of legacy features will be added to the Hangouts Chat and Meet replacements. At Cloud Next 2019, Google announced Chat integration in Gmail, while public streaming and live captioning are coming to Hangouts Meet.


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Google details Hangouts Chat & Meet upgrade timeline for G Suite ahead of October ‘classic’ retirement

Hangouts Chat

After our report last year that Google plans to shut down classic Hangouts in 2020, the company announced that it was “fully committed” to supporting classic Hangouts users until it completed a “successful” migration to Hangouts Chat and Meet. The company didn’t detail a timeline for the Hangouts transition then, but now that day has come — at least for G Suite users.


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Say goodbye? I say Allo: A brief look at the past, present, and future of Google messaging

Over the past week, the narrative around Google’s messaging and communication services has been defined by a spate of planned deprecations — both of which 9to5Google first reported about. While older services will be “sunset,” the company’s vision for consumers hasn’t changed much since earlier this year, revolving around RCS “Chat” and Google Duo video calling.

However, complicating this dual-service future now is the newly-revealed fact that the enterprise-focused Hangouts Chat and Meet will also be available to consumers, and that Google Voice is still an active service. This is just the latest in Google’s tangled and sometimes incoherent strategy for simply saying “Hello.”


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Google officially confirms Allo shutdown for 2019, move away from ‘classic Hangouts’

Hangouts shutdown

Over the past several days, 9to5Google reported that Google was planning to move away from “classic Hangouts” and sunset Google Allo. Amid the discussion about the company’s messaging future, Google today clarified its strategy, and published a definite blog post confirming our two reports.


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Hangouts Chat

[Update: Google statement] Hangouts Chat & Hangouts Meet will open to consumers before ‘Hangouts classic’ shuts down

Things are shaking up again in the ever-quaking world of Google’s endless messaging apps. Yesterday, we reported that Google’s Hangouts messaging service would shut down some time in 2020. While one Googler has refuted that timeline, he’s not denied that what he calls the “classic version of Hangouts” is on the way out, and one step of this process is to open Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat to consumers.


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