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Over the past 15 years, Google has introduced more than a dozen messaging services that include text, voice and video calls. 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 kind of ad that might have been expected to bring some consistency to the company’s confusing messaging messaging, but as is tradition for Google in this area there is a lot of confusion to be made.
For one thing, Google Chat is the name fans have fondly used to refer to Google’s original messaging service, Google Talk, for many years. Is it a coincidence that closes Google’s messaging circle with ouroboros, or is it meant to entice GChat fans to actually use the company’s latest attempt?
Additionally, Google Chat contains its own messaging rooms that were previously called Rooms, but will soon evolve into something called Spaces, although Google introduced a different messaging app called Spaces in 2016.
Here’s a breakdown of Google’s top messaging offerings over the years, with currently active services in bold:
Email: Gmail
Messaging services: Google Talk, Google Plus Huddle, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Google Chat, plus countless chat features built into other Google products that we won’t mention here
SMS / RCS services: Google Voice, Android Messages app with RCS chat integration
Video conferencing services: Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Plus Hangouts, Google Duo, Google Meet
Collaboration Software: Google Wave, Google Plus Circles, Google Docs Chat, Google Chat
Within that mess of product names are two fundamental issues: Google’s apparent love of launching new services and its inability to combine products under a single umbrella.
Competitors like WhatsApp demonstrate what the opposite approach could be: a chat service tied to a users’ phone number that allows video and voice, all from a single app. Or there’s Apple’s iPhone approach, which ties email addresses and phone numbers to two services: iMessage for text and FaceTime for audio and video.
Google continues to fall into the same cycle, though, which has repeated itself over the years. It will build new services, integrating them into more areas of its product range, then try to clean up the slate, launch new services that will (eventually) replace the old set and start the cycle again.
Here are the four eras of Google messaging so far:
April 1, 2004: Gmail launches in beta. Arguably Google’s first communications product, Gmail promised a new type of email service where users wouldn’t have to delete emails and could search for old threads with the same power as Google’s main site. It was originally thought to be an April Fool’s joke.
August 2005: Google Talk is launched, kicking off Google’s foray into messaging services. In addition to instant messaging, Talk also offered voice calling via its desktop client. Talk would be integrated into Gmail in 2006 as a sort of AOL email service from AOL Instant Messenger to Gmail. Found in the Chat window in Gmail, users end up calling it GChat.
November 2007: Google Talk receives support for group chats, allowing users to message multiple contacts in real time.
October 2008: Google launches Android for smartphones, with support for both Google Talk and normal SMS.
November 2008: Google Talk is added to Gmail with voice and video chat.
March 2009: launch of Google Voice. A rebrand of an existing company called GrandCentral that Google bought in 2007, Google Voice allows users to sign up for a single phone number that can send and receive text messages and calls on both PCs and phones. Google Voice and Google Talk remain separate services.
May 2009: Google Wave is announced at Google I / O. Billed as a grand vision for the future of internet communication, Wave reinvented email and chat as a series of grouped threads with different users until Google stopped development a year later. While it was a flop overall, Wave is now seen as a precursor to team messaging apps like Slack.
February 2010: Google launches Google Buzz. It’s primarily a microblogging service like Twitter that lives inside Gmail, but it also offers private messages that you can send to small groups. It was discontinued in 2011 to make way for Google+.
April 2010: Google adds chat to Google Docs. The new chat feature is designed to allow document editors to communicate with each other while editing a document, but is separate from Google’s other chat services.
August 2010: Google Voice is integrated into Gmail, allowing Gmail users to call regular phone numbers directly from Gmail as an expansion of Google Talks’ voice calling feature.
April 2011: Google adds live video chat to Android, bringing Google Talks voice and internet calls to mobile devices.
The era of Google + / Hangouts (20112016)
June 2011: Google+ launch. Apparently Google’s approach to Facebook’s social media dominance also introduces two messaging services of its own: Huddle group text messages for phones and Hangouts for group videos.
It’s the first part of Google’s messaging cycle: introducing new services, although it will take Google two years to finalize the branding and strategy here.
July 2012: Google launches Hangouts in Gmail, calling it a more modern version of the existing video calling feature that Gmail had offered through Google Talk. Yep, let’s start seeing the second part of the cycle, as Google begins building Hangouts in its other services.
May 2013: Google+ Hangouts is relaunched as Google’s new global messaging platform. It tries to merge other Google video chat and messaging apps into one unified service, replacing Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and the old Google+ Hangouts video chat service.
Notably, Hangouts doesn’t include SMS integration at launch.
September 2014: Google Voice is integrated into Hangouts, continuing Google’s efforts for a consistent messaging system and offering support for SMS.
April 2015: Google Fi is launched as Project Fi. Google’s phone plan also integrates with Hangouts but leads to headaches with Google Voice, as the two services coexist side by side.
June 2016: Google Talk for Android and Gmail (still unofficially called GChat or Google Chat, despite what most people call it) is discontinued, marking the end of Google’s original messaging service.
The Google Allo era (20162019)
May 2016: Google starts its cycle again at Google I / O 2016, announcing both Allo, a new messaging app, and Duo, a new video chat application. Both are separate from Hangouts, once again muddying the waters.
March 2017: Google announces that Hangouts will be renamed Hangouts Chat, with a new focus on business use. Google also launches Hangouts Meet, a business video conferencing app that later becomes Google’s answer to Zoom. Allo and Duo are expected to replace Hangouts as new consumer options for messaging and video chat.
June 2017: GChat is finally, truly discontinued. Google also removes SMS support from Hangouts to better position it as a Slack competitor.
April 2018: Google suspends investments in Allo, instead focusing on RCS, a new standard to replace SMS. Confusingly, Google uses the phrase chat services to refer to enabling RCS on Android, despite it being unrelated to Google Talk (commonly referred to as GChat) and Hangouts Chat / Google Chat.
December 2018: Google admits it actually closed Allo.
May 2019: Google actually closes Allo.
The modern era: return to Hangouts sort of (from 2020 to today) Google
With Google’s RCS-centric mobile messaging, the company returns to Hangouts as its old and new web-based communications service. But in a twist, the COVID-19 pandemic puts business communication tools like Slack and Zoom in the foreground not only for businesses, but also for people’s daily lives to use for socializing, school, and more.
March 2020: Hangouts Meet is released to personal Google Accounts as a new group video conferencing option.
April 2020: Hangouts Chat (which steadily grew into a Slack / Discord-style app during the previous era) is renamed to Google Chat marking the return of some sort of Google Chat name, though the slow launch could mean that you still have Hangouts lurking in your Gmail browser window.
April 2020: Hangouts Meet is renamed to Google Meet.
June 2021: Google releases Google Chat to all customers and announces that Rooms will become Spaces. Spaces function similar to a Slack or Discord room, providing a central place for larger group discussions than normal group threads that still exist in Chat too.
It’s been a long way to get here, but with the launch of Workspace and Google Chat for non-business users, it’s almost possible to see Google’s strategy. Gmail exists for email; 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 and larger rooms based on a particular topic or conversation; and there’s Meet for video chats.
Mobile messaging is more complicated, however, with Google having spent years trying to make their services work side-by-side with carrier technologies like SMS and RCS, and there’s no end in sight. Working with mobile carrier technology to prosecute Apple and WhatsApp isn’t a bad idea, but it’s unclear whether Google can actually catch up.
While RCS could be a strong competitor to replace SMS, it doesn’t connect to web-based Google chat at all although, confusingly, Google also refers to RCS services as chat. And on the video front, it’s unclear why Google Duo still exists after the larger release of Hangouts Meet as the two accomplish largely the same things.
If anything is clear in 2021, it is that the future of Google messaging is likely to remain confused for quite some time.
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