Google's most utilized chat tool
Google Hangouts product has been a venerable bulwark in the communication apps space. Google Hangouts remains a popular and suitable chat application for millions. Built on a concise and powerful software, Hangouts became Google’s most utilized chat application. This will all be changing in the near future, however. Hangouts is experiencing a transition period that will culminate in its eventual abandonment. For the time being, Hangouts will remain a stable and efficient chat application through October 2019. At that time, Google will migrate all G Suite customers to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Classic Hangouts, as it is now known, will be serviced through the end of the year but will likely be retired sometime in 2020. Hangouts is on its final flight and poised for the scrap yard.
Hangouts was once a steady chat app
Set for the gallows in 2020, the time has come to hang up on Google Hangouts.
Hangouts’ bread and butter is sending instant messages as a faster and cheaper SMS alternative. It is nimble and powerful enough for the average talk via text customer. It is also discreet enough to save space and time by omitting superfluous features. Many use it to inconspicuously contact friends while at work. Because it nests neatly in the Gmail account or browser page, users avoid sitting awkwardly, hunched over a cell phone as they attempt to evade the boss’ attention. The user is always greeted with a clean dashboard, organized with intuitive icons. Consumers will find their past conversations neatly stacked in cards in the dashboard. One should use this application to send instant messages and conduct video and, or voice calls.
Customers can mute themselves, add people to threads, or stop video recording while on call. The designers have done a premium job, upgrading the professionalism available in the app. Simply draw up the settings tab to deploy a lower-third banner to display a name or title while on a work conference. Hangouts has been known to slowly load a pixelated image, get choppy or lose a call. To help with connectivity, you can choose to stop video recording to use less data or call upon the 'adjust bandwidth use' button. Hangouts is also a pleasantly pain-free and reliable way to schedule work conferences and interviews.
Enter Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Chat and Meet look to be enterprise-friendly variations of the more commercial-friendly Classic Hangouts. Think, Slack, rather than WhatsApp. In truth, however, these products have virtually nothing to do with one another aside from their similar names. Chat and Meet launched 10 months ago whereas Classic Hangout, built as an in-place upgrade to Google Talk has a user-base spanning 13 years back. Perhaps the developer seeks to leverage the brand recognition and trust placed in Hangouts in its attempt to penetrate Slack’s corporate carve-out. Once one accounts for the power within G Suite’s plethora of work accessories, this line of thinking makes a lot of sense. Due to the on-going transition, users may deploy many exciting new features in Hangouts. Hangouts Chat will allow for chatting with users outside its particular domain. It will have Google voice integration and deep integration with Gmail. It will also provide for enhanced video calling beyond the at present, standard 720p. App integration has exploded the possibilities available in Hangouts. This allows for access within the program to many other programs, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and countless more third-party developers. With G Suite apps fully integrated into the workplace chatbox, team projects will be more centralized, streamlined, and transparent than ever.
Apps that chat
Your proclivity may be found elsewhere. Here are a few chat app options and the key character to draw you over. Slack is centered on channels where team members instant message, and share files, photos, and videos. Slack provides the meeting place to integrate other devices and drives. Slack’s design goal is to synergize office workflow and explode your team’s productivity.
WhatsApp is there to put a smile to a friend’s face. This app is home to customizable fonts, gifs, emojis, and stickers. Its interface is tooled to keep pace in the flow of an enjoyable conversation.
Facebook Messenger is a natural extension of Facebook’s environment itself. There are not many flashy new developments on this platform, although they can be discovered with just a bit of effort. This is the chat app for those who quite simply need to get a casual message to the right person.
Where can you run this program?
You can run this application on Window’s or Mac systems. You can also obtain a free application download for iPhone or Android. The need to create a Gmail account may be enough to deter many away from Hangouts. In fact, the choice to use a chat app will likely already be made for many. We use the apps our friends use.
Is there a better alternative?
If your friends do not already have a Gmail account then there are plenty of perfectly adequate alternatives destined to fill your demands.
Our take
Classic Hangouts is slated to become a legacy product as Google unveils Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. At the moment, Google Hangouts deserves neither great recognition nor ire. If you use it to talk to your friends, pick up the immensely more popular and enjoyable WhatsApp. If you use Hangouts at work, the likelihood you pick up Google Chat is dependent on your dissatisfaction with your company’s current chat software rather than your satisfaction with Classic Hangouts. Google Hangouts is not undergoing a transformation.
Should you download it?
No, this is nothing less than a full replacement. It is time Hangouts is hung up.
