RIP Google Hangouts, Google’s last, best chance to compete with iMessage

Google Hangouts is scheduled for death today. The phone app has been individually booting people off the service since July, but the last vestiges of Hangouts, the web app, will be shut down today.

For a brief period, Hangouts was Google's best, most ambitious, most popular messaging effort, but 5 billion downloads later, Google is moving on. Hangout's next of kin, Google Chat, should have all of your messages and contacts automatically imported by now, but the new service is a mere shadow of the original plan for Hangouts. The closing of Hangouts is the latest chapter in the mess that is Google's messaging history. Google Talk launched 17 years ago, and Google still doesn't have a competitive message platform. Part of the reason we're on Google's umpteenth messaging app is that there is no solid, stable home for messaging inside Google.

You can see the problem in the company's 2022 messaging lineup. The Google Workspace team makes Google Chat—that's Google's business team making a Slack competitor—and then there's Google Messages, a carrier-centric sort-of-competitor to Apple's iMessage that seemingly grew out of 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 messaging, but splitting the Google user base across two incompatible products makes it tough for either project to gain any traction. Besides those two big projects, there's also still Google Voice and a bunch of siloed messaging services in apps like Google Photos and Google Pay.