Hangouts for Android is getting a huge update. 16 months ago Hangouts for iOS added video messaging which allowed users to send a 10 seconds video message to their hangout contacts, few months back they increased the limit to 1 minute. While all this was happening on the iOS side, the Android side of Hangouts never got received this update. Finally, after a long wait of 16months Hangouts for Android has the ability to record video.
But that's not the only update Hangouts is getting on Android, the app will soon shake up the service by disabling one crucial feature almost everyone liked. The SMS integration is changing. It is one of the features you never realised you are using but until this day you are using it as a Hangout user.
Google is getting rid of merged conversations. Lets understand this properly, when hangouts was released you were greeted with an option to merge your Hangouts and SMS together. This lets you have a seamless converse with your contact via SMS or chat or Google Voice SMS from the same conversation thread. You can enable or disable this from settings any time you want. For people who wanted to keep things separate Google also had the dedicated Messenger App which only and only handled SMS conversations.
With the next Hangouts; version 11, you can still send SMS but you will have a separate thread for SMS, Hangouts, SMS and even Google Voice SMS even if it's for the same contact from your phonebook. Google claims the merged conversations was not a widely used feature and they think people find it confusing at times and accidently send the wrong message type.
Merged conversations used to let you see your Hangouts messages and text messages in the same conversation. We have decided to remove it, because it caused user confusion and had low usage.
From version 11, all your merged conversations will be split up in different chat threads and when you want to send a message you shall be asked to choose if you want to send a SMS or Hangout message or SMS via Google Voice. This is as bad as it sounds and shall be a painful task every time you use the App.
You can use other apps for SMS like Messenger or Signal or tons of other SMS alternative in the Play Store but for Hangouts you will have to use this and the only way to stay away from this update is never updating to v11 but since v10 is a lot buggy you would need to upgrade to v11 sometime in the future.
Hangouts is letting go for the merged conversation from the version 11 which isn't out yet but will soon be available in the next update on Play Store or if you are impatient you can sideload and install from APK Mirror.
This step even though is major, is likely to define and categorize the Google's messaging platform clutter. Not far from now, Google will be launching its new messaging apps, Duo and Allo which features Google's Assistant (chatbots), video calls and a lot of other features which you are mostly aware of in some form or the other but Google wants to consolidate services and integrate a lot of AI features via chatbots in your conversations. You can sign up for Allo and Duo to be informed about its launch soon.
Don't worry, at least for now Google hasn't announced that it will kill Hangouts So Hangouts is likely to stay for a while until Google consolidates everything together and finally has a platform that everyone uses and likes. Till then we shall just keep jumping between apps to get the best out of this situation.
