​​A very brief history of every Google messaging app
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Over the past 15 years, Google has introduced more than a dozen messaging services spanning text, voice, and video calling. This week, the company’s efforts culminated in the general availability of Google Chat, a combination of Slack / Discord-style rooms with more traditional messaging.

It’s the sort of announcement that might have been expected to bring some consistency to the company’s muddled messenger messaging, but — as is traditional for Google in this area — there’s plenty of confusion to go around.

Here are the four eras of Google messaging so far:

✨ THE GOOGLE TALK ERA (2004–2011)
✨ THE GOOGLE+ / HANGOUTS ERA (2011–2016)
✨ THE GOOGLE ALLO ERA (2016–2019)
✨ THE MODERN ERA: BACK TO HANGOUTS — SORT OF (2020 TO DATE)

It’s been a long road to get here, but with the launch of Workspace and Google Chat to non-enterprise users, it’s almost possible to see Google’s strategy. Gmail exists for emails; Chat is the GChat / Hangouts-style messaging system for real-time conversations and group chats; Spaces is the Slack / Discord-style area for more persistent, larger rooms based on a particular topic or conversation; and there’s Meet for video chats.

Mobile messaging is messier, though, with Google having spent years trying to get its own services to work side by side with carrier technologies like SMS and RCS — and there’s no end in sight. Working with cellular carrier technology to pursue Apple and WhatsApp isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s not clear whether Google can actually manage to catch up.

Even if RCS might be a strong contender to replace SMS, it doesn’t connect to the web-based Google Chat at all — even though, confusingly, Google refers to RCS services as “chat” as well. And on the video front, it’s not clear why Google Duo still exists following the broader release of Hangouts Meet since the two largely accomplish the same things.

If anything is clear in 2021, it’s that Google’s messaging future will likely remain muddled for quite some time.
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