On November 1, another once-popular product, the Google Hangouts messenger, went to the Cemetery of Closed Google Projects . In June, the company began to transfer users of the mobile version of Hangouts to another messenger (Google Chat) , and on the first day of November, turned off the web version of the service.

The shutdown of Hangouts is the latest chapter in a long and chaotic story of Google’s attempts to find its place in the messaging market. It all started 17 years ago with the launch of Google Talk. Google Talk started in 2005 as a way for users to send instant messages directly through Gmail. Later, voice and video calls, as well as group chats, appeared in it. Google discontinued Google Talk in 2017 and switched users to the Hangouts messenger. But later, the company decided to move users from Hangouts to the Meet app. And in connection with the closure of Hangouts, users were transferred to Google Chat.

Such confusion and diversity of messengers is caused by the fact that Google itself does not have a single stable “home” for messaging. And the next closure of the messenger does not lead to order in this area. The Google Workspace team makes Google Chat is the Google business team building a Slack competitor. Initially, Google Chat was planned to be used in business, but then it was made public. But then there’s Google Messages, a sort of carrier-focused competitor to Apple’s iMessage, which apparently grew out of the Android team. Both teams have their own reasons for creating the messenger. But splitting Google’s user base into two incompatible products makes it difficult for any project to move forward. In addition to these two big projects, there is also Google Voice and many disparate messaging services in other Google apps, such as Google Photos and Google Pay.

Once upon a time, Google tried to fix this situation. Messaging services were supposed to have a single home within Google, which was supposed to be Google+. Indeed, 2 years after the launch of the corresponding social network project, the corresponding messaging project appeared – Google+ Hangouts. He was tasked with bringing together the Google messaging portfolio. At the time, Google had four messaging apps: Google+ Messenger, Google Talk, an Android SMS app, and Google Voice. But over time, Google+ was also put under the knife , so the unification of all Google messaging services into one did not work out.

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Google is merging Duo and Meet into one voice and video calling app

Source: arstechnica