One handled video conferencing, the other was a Slack-like service.įinally, SMS support in Hangouts was outright killed. Google Voice began disentangling itself from the Hangouts amalgamation in 2018 as Hangouts Chat debuted, and by the end of the year, Hangouts was rumored to be on the chopping block. In 2017, as Hangouts languished in Google's forgotten pile of services, the company finally split Hangouts up, introducing new Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat services meant for business.
For a moment, Allo was the #1 app on the Play Store, though it didn't last long.
