Google is officially urging Hangouts holdouts emigrate over to the brand new messaging suite, known as Chat. Starting as we speak, in the event you’re nonetheless utilizing Hangouts in your cellular gadget, you’ll see an in-app display screen urging you to maneuver to Chat in Gmail or the separate Chat app. If you’re on Chrome, you’ll begin to see the immediate encouraging you to simply accept the inevitability of what’s taking place starting in July. Hangouts on the net will proceed to function till later this yr.

Fortunately for me, I moved over to Google’s new Chat app when the corporate introduced that it could be retiring Hangouts final summer time. Google allowed customers to modify earlier than the pressured migration, and the up to date expertise has been far more palatable than Hangouts, anyway.

Google Chat continues to be a chat app related to your Google account. You can use wealthy textual content modifying and Slack-like options like “@ mentions” and emoji reactions. Google Chat additionally prioritizes collaboration. It provides “spaces” for group chats, which helps you to embed issues like information, photographs, and duties for simple referencing. I exploit the brand new options to plan playdates and day journeys and maintain monitor of images not within the cloud. It’s additionally develop into a means my associate and I handle our family with out shuffling between Google’s many different apps.

Google Chat’s transforming is primarily a byproduct of the corporate’s shift to Workspaces. As Google explicitly states in its weblog, it has “big ambitions for the future of Chat.” In the approaching months, we are able to anticipate further options like direct calling, in-line threading, and the power to share and look at a number of pictures. The comparisons to Slack and Discord are plain. I’m additionally curious if the direct calling function is a holdover from Google Duo, the corporate’s video app that’s additionally dealing with an expiration date down the road.

Undoubtedly, Google Chat will get some use inside the organizations that use the corporate’s Workspaces suite to get issues executed. But it’s a surprise if it’ll have the identical impression that different messaging apps have had, contemplating how usually Google has pulled the bait and change.

The excellent news is that the transition over to Google Chat will likely be seamless. I nonetheless have my unique conversations from when Chat was Hangouts. The app additionally has a brand new function that acknowledges whenever you’re chatting from one other gadget so that you simply don’t get pinged on a number of platforms with each new reply.