Hangouts Chat And Meet Out Of The Picture Now, Renamed As ‘Google Chat’

Google updated its support pages yesterday to delete the Hangouts from Hangouts Meet. The company just announced today that it has officially renamed Hangout Chats as Google Chat.  

While the company has not issued an official statement on its forums, it has stated its plans for a rebranding. When you head over to Google’s support page and the application’s dedicated page, you can see that the update is now in place.

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However, the rebranding effort is far from complete, as not only does the Play Store listing still refer to Hangouts Chat — the same is true of Google Meet. Also the help pages themselves tend to refer to Hangouts Chat. At least the documentation for the Meet app is a bit more up-to-date.

Nevertheless, the consumer-focused Hangouts app will continue to brandish its name. “The app (classic) edition of Hangouts won’t change,” a Google spokeswoman said. The standard, old Hangouts can also be found in the Gmail Web app. 

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The move definitely will explain some of the lingering branding concerns surrounding Google’s chat suite of applications. The enterprise-focused offerings are now named Google Chat and Google Meet, while the consumer-focused service maintains the Hangouts branding. But while it solves one problem, it generates another one too.

The chat is also what Google calls its newfangled replacement of RCS-based SMS.