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.
Apparently GChat was only a colloquial term for the product formerly known as Google Talk? I thought it was a separate thing from the Talk VoIP service.
Good to know I'm not going crazy. Maybe being gaslighted by wikipedia editors but that's not out of the ordinary. The Wikipedia entry for Google Talk[1], says:
> 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]
I wish they would put a "Messaging Czar" in charge with completely authority, to fix that mess. They know their target is iMessage and WhatsApp, yet don't seem to coalesce around any product in particular.
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.
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.
Hangouts has come a long way... it started out as a 'drop-in group video' feature for Google+. The idea being you could "hangout" with your friends by just starting a room and then anyone who saw it could join you. Basically Houseparty.
Do you know if there's any kind of whitepaper describing Duo's security model? When I search for information I'm finding a lot of stuff about Cisco's Duo product, but not a lot about Google's.
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.