Indeed, it's surprising that there is no sign of end-to-end encryption on Hangouts, while the competition (with marketshare) is getting there. iMessage had end-to-end encryption since the beginning. Whatsapp has end-to-end encryption on Android based on TextSecure (though it is still hard to see whether it's active). Telegram has support, though it's not the default.

In the meanwhile, Apple also has encrypted notes, phones that are encrypted by default, etc.

Google seems to focus purely on transport security.

E2E would mean you can't log in to hangouts on a new device and access your history, which is a useful feature.

No it doesn't. It just makes that a little harder to implement. You can set up a side channel between your own devices to sync that history. Or you can use double-encrypted key and just change the outer layer of that onion when a new device is added.

>You can set up a side channel between your own devices to sync that history.

Then

1. Some device would need to be logged in and online (not always true)

2. You'd need a way to authenticate the new device, which means not only do you need the other device on, but you need it close when first setting it up, and you'd need to manually transfer keys or something of similar bandwidth

3.Either all history would need to transfer, which is a bandwidth hog if history is large (although if device is close then you could transfer over Wifi direct or bluetooth or something), or that other device would need to kept online whenever I want to query history (currently, Google serves this function)

4. If you lose a device, there's no recovery (this is probably the main reason Google won't do it.)

If you really want it, there are apps that do E2E and support Google Talk. See https://chatsecure.org/

Conversations.im [1] fulfils the same purpose, has the same features, also is open source, is on F-Droid, and looks better.

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[1] https://conversations.im/

The development on the end-to-end extension seems to be relatively slow if you look at the commit log.

Does anyone with more inside information know what is going on with it? Does it have dedicated team members or is this just an internal side project for a couple people?

Why would Google implement e2e crypto? Doesn't that violate their business model?

I would assume for their millions of paying email users... The business model would be to charge money for feature requested by customer.

If you think that enterprise hosted email customers want end-to-end encryption, you are seriously mislead. What most of the customers want more than anything is censorship and compliance, at delivery time. They want mails to be rejected if they have naughty words. They want viruses dropped. They want messages containing customer credit card numbers dropped.

Content analysis is the #1 feature required by enterprise email customers. They do _not_ want end-to-end encryption that would prevent content inspection by intermediaries. They do not want that at all.

I guess it all depends on the enterprise. Encryption is a requirement for certain businesses. My partner is required to use it at her law firm when working with certain clients.