RIP Google Hangouts, Google’s last, best chance to compete with iMessage

Google Hangouts is scheduled for death today. The phone app has been individually booting people off the service since July, but the last vestiges of Hangouts, the web app, will be shut down today.

For a brief period, Hangouts was Google's best, most ambitious, most popular messaging effort, but 5 billion downloads later, Google is moving on. Hangout's next of kin, Google Chat, should have all of your messages and contacts automatically imported by now, but the new service is a mere shadow of the original plan for Hangouts.

The closing of Hangouts is the latest chapter in the mess that is Google's messaging history. Google Talk launched 17 years ago, and Google still doesn't have a competitive message platform. Part of the reason we're on Google's umpteenth messaging app is that there is no solid, stable home for messaging inside Google.

You can see the problem in the company's 2022 messaging lineup. The Google Workspace team makes Google Chat—that's Google's business team making a Slack competitor—and then there's Google Messages, a carrier-centric sort-of-competitor to Apple's iMessage that seemingly grew out of the Android team. Is the team that makes Android more or less important than the team that makes Gmail and the rest of the Google apps? Both have their understandable reasons for chasing messaging, but splitting the Google user base across two incompatible products makes it tough for either project to gain any traction. Besides those two big projects, there's also still Google Voice and a bunch of siloed messaging services in apps like Google Photos and Google Pay.

Once upon a time, Google tried to fix this situation. Messaging was supposed to have a real home at Google, and that home was supposed to be (cue dramatic thunderclap) Google+. Back in 2011, Google's then-CEO Larry Page decided that social media was the future and spun up the Google+ project across the company. The head of G+ got the title "senior vice president," making him one of the eight-ish people who reported directly to Page, enshrining Google+ as one of the main pillars of Google. This division was supposed to take full ownership of messaging, and it launched its messaging project—Google+ Hangouts—two years later.

Hangouts, which was codenamed "Project Babel," was charged with the task of—get this—unifying Google's messaging portfolio. Google had four messaging apps at the time: Google+ Messenger, Google Talk, Android's SMS app, and Google Voice. Hangouts launched in 2013, and by the end of the year had integrated SMS messages. By 2014, the app was fully operational and featured Hangouts Messages, SMS, and Google Voice in one app, all available from your phone or anywhere on the Internet. With the release of Android 4.4 in 2013, there was no standalone Android SMS app. Hangouts was the only default SMS option.

Google had built its iMessage clone, and it was an incredible service. All your communication was available from a single messaging app in one easy-to-use interface. Google also had tangible advantages over iMessage, thanks to wide cross-platform compatibility. Hangouts was on Android, iOS, the web, and inside Gmail. That meant the service natively worked on phones, watches, cars, tablets, web browsers, and even Google Glass at one point. Google would probably have a decent footing in messaging today if it just kept updating and investing in Hangouts.