Hangouts is, as many of you know, Google’s communication platform which lets you chat both via video and text messages. This service has been around for a long time now, and it has quite an extensive user base. Now, Google had announced during this year’s Google I/O that two new apps are coming, Duo and Allo. The Google Duo as is essentially a video chat app, while Allo is a messaging application which will be integrated with Google Assistant. Many people thought that this means Hangouts will cease to exist, but Google quickly denied that by saying that Hangouts is staying put, but it’s, more or less, moving to the enterprise sector.
That being said, Google’s Hangouts app just got a new update, the Mountain View giant has updated Hangouts to version 12, and along with this update comes something truly great, well, depending on how you’re looking at things that is. Now, Hangouts v12 brings along Shruggie, a well-known emoticon, well, if we can call it that. This emotion lets you show that something is unimportant to you, or if we are to use some slang, then we’d describe this a ‘meh’ emoticon, which is probably the best way you can describe it. This addition to Hangouts probably won’t mean much to most of you, but those of you who love using Shruggie will certainly appreciate it. Using a Shruggie emoticon in your conversation is really easy now, all you have to do is type “/shruggie” and the little guy will appear in your text window.
Some of you are probably wondering what else has Google included in this update, Shruggie inclusion cannot be the only new thing Google has introduced, right? Wrong, this emoticon actually seems to be the only addition to Hangouts, believe it or not. Now, according to the source’s APK teardown, Google is actually planning to include a rather interesting feature in a future update though. There seem to be three different filtering options in the APK teardown, which suggests filters are coming to Hangouts. This could be a really important feature for Hangouts, especially if you’re using the platform for work, and that is exactly what Google wants you to use Hangouts for it seems, now that Duo is available, and Allo is on its way. If you’re eager to install Hangouts v12, and are unwilling to wait for the update, click on the banner down below which will let you download the app and install it manually.