My understanding is Google has said externally that they plan on killing the classic Hangouts product. So that means Google chat and Google Meet would be available in consumer space for people with @gmail.com addresses. but right now the focus of those two products is on gSuite.
I'd also definitely agree with what other people are saying, duo is the FaceTime competitor. It has direct integration into the Google dialer in the Google SMS app. It's also rather brain dead simple to use.
This is weird to hear, to me hangouts was always the new thing that ousted gchat.
> google chat [...] would be available in consumer space
I can't imagine they're bringing back the old old thing, are they?
The Wikipedia disambiguation page really clears up the mess that is Google's branding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat
> Google Talk, also known as Google Chat,[1] was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication.[2] The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users.[3]
What a mess.
Are they too scared of regulators to make an iMessage-like service in Android? RCS will barely nibble at the ground they need to cover in order to compete for real.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21215588/google-chat-hango...
It is effectively a slack or teams competitor.
Classic Hangouts is/was a lot of things. Sadly it was too many things. The new Chat has very similar Gmail integration, so if they ever get it out to consumer, it hopefully won't be a big change for people.
Specifically, where do the private keys reside?
Desktop -- Meet/Chat converging and getting a unified UI for business/desktop users.
I think it is taking time, but it's finally happening and Hangouts will officially be shut down when the merging happens.
The integration with Meet consists of a single "invite to video call" button that creates a new video call and inserts the link into your message. There's no option to stop people from inviting you to new calls/set your Google chat status as busy when accepting a call.
Meet itself is also frustrating to use for anything more than a 2-3 person meeting; it doesn't display more than 4 video feeds at once on your screen. It's also unable to save settings between video calls (if you don't want to have incoming and outgoing 720p streams all the time you have to change the settings at the start of every call). Zoom and even Jitsi are both miles ahead of it.
There is no reason to use either product besides the fact that they come with enterprise Gmail accounts. They both still feel like prototypes or minimum viable products (especially Chat).
A mobile only consumer proposition is useless. Sounds like Google's internal strategy here is still a disaster.
TBF both Meet and Duo have been awesome, Hangouts has withered on the vine. It could have been a unified solution but... Google.