Hangouts Becomes Hangouts Chat. Hangouts Meet Appears. Meanwhile, Google Launches “Rooms.”
Around the same time that Allo and Duo launched, Google decided to pivot Google Hangouts and turn it into an enterprise platform. To do this, it split Hangouts into two distinct apps: Hangouts Chat, which became an enterprise messenger designed for team chatter and Hangouts Meet, which was supposed to be the video conferencing client. Meanwhile, Google also introduced “Rooms,” a feature within Hangouts that allowed for distinct conversations between multiple users—basically a resurrection of other similar features that had come before.
