Google rebrands its business-focused teleconferencing app Hangouts Meet to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat, leaving Hangouts brand for consumers
Following the official change from Hangouts Meet to Google Meet — Google has officially removed the Hangouts brand …
The VergeNick Statt
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been unwinding the Hangouts brand for three years: in 2017 it split Hangouts into Chat and Meet — a Slack-style messaging app and an HD video conferencing tool — and in early 2019 announced it would retire classic Hangouts for G Suite customers. Today's move finishes the naming half of that split, stripping 'Hangouts' from both business apps while leaving the old brand attached to the consumer product.
The rebrand matters because it clears the way for what follows in the coverage: by October 2020 Google folds Meet and Chat into a rebranded Google Workspace with integrated Rooms, and by late 2022 it begins prompting mobile Hangouts users toward Chat ahead of a full Hangouts shutdown. A clean product name is the prerequisite for that consolidation.
First-order effects
G Suite administrators and employees now deal with two plainly named apps — Google Meet for video calls and Google Chat for messaging — removing the confusion between business Hangouts tools and the lingering consumer Hangouts client.
Consumer Hangouts users are explicitly carved out: they keep the legacy brand for now, making them the visible remainder of a product line Google is winding down on the enterprise side.
Second-order effects
With Meet standing alone under its own name, it competes head-to-head with Zoom and Microsoft Teams in the surge of remote-work conferencing, rather than as a sub-brand of a deprecated messenger.
The renamed Chat becomes the designated landing spot for displaced Hangouts users, so every subsequent Hangouts retirement notice effectively funnels consumers into Google's business messaging product.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, Google's messaging portfolio consolidates from a sprawl of overlapping brands (Hangouts, Allo-era experiments, Chat, Meet) into a single Workspace-integrated stack, with the enterprise suite — not standalone apps — as the organizing unit.
A unified Meet/Chat naming also positions Google to enforce one identity across its productivity apps, the same integration logic that produced the Workspace rebrand and new logos across the suite.
The trend: Google is dissolving the Hangouts era piece by piece, folding its messaging and video tools into a single Workspace-branded enterprise stack while retiring the consumer client.
Okay, so Hangout Chat is Google Chat, Hangouts Meet is Google Meet, consumer Hangouts is still Hangouts, Hangouts for G Suite is still Hangouts. Uh, what? https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
If God really has nine billion names, Google has used at least 10% of them just on names for its videoconferencing product. https://www.theverge.com/...
Google's inability to stick to a naming convention for more than a year for video & messaging communication services over the past decade is truly baffling. If they didn't have an advertising monopoly, it'd be somewhat concerning https://www.theverge.com/...
I read this whole article and I still have no idea what product I will be using to chat or video chat in google services. 😖 https://www.theverge.com/...
this news is 3 hours old - I have it from a trusted source that Google Chat has just been rebranded as Google Duo Allo Hangouts Plus Wwaave Voice Meet https://twitter.com/...
I wonder how many times Google needs to rename its chat and messaging services before people actually care and start using them https://twitter.com/...
Google's responses to the popularity of Zoom have been 1.) Ban their employees from using it. 2.) Rename their competing products 3.) Continue to ship seven chat apps with overlapping branding & features https://www.theverge.com/...
It's a little-known fact, but every Google PM's OKRs are as follows: O: Successfully rebrand communications platform KR: Get 1000 articles covering name change KR: Confuse 500 customers KR: Maintain 1:2 ratio of current:abandoned chat apps https://twitter.com/...
i'm comforted that at least i can count on google to change the name of their messaging service, or introduce another one, every few months https://www.theverge.com/...
Hangouts (for G Suite) is no more: Google is rebranding it as Google Chat, following the rebranding of Hangouts Meet as just Meet. This is not to be confused with RCS Chat for Android... oh and Hangouts is still around for consumers. Nothing matters!https://www.theverge.com/ ...