Google has officially rebranded Hangouts Meet, its video conferencing app for businesses, to Google Meet which is how it will be referred to going forward.
The rebranding is already starting to take place but it won’t be an immediate change over. Meaning the entire user base won’t see the rebrand take place overnight.
Instead, Google says the rebrand will take place on a rolling basis. So over the next few days and more likely weeks, users will begin to see the new name across all versions, such as the app and website.
The Google Meet rebrand might be the beginning of phasing out Hangouts chat
First things first, Google has not said anything about Hangouts chat being phased out by the rebrand of Hangouts Meet.
It would seem like a logical progression, but until Google says otherwise there’s nothing but speculation to go off of. That being said that does seem to be the general speculation.
Some have been under the impression that Google would be moving away from Hangouts (at least in name) for some time now. And with Hangouts Meet now being labeled as something else, that scenario seems more plausible.
If Google does ever decide to change the official name of the Hangouts chat app on Android, users may not immediately know. The change to Google Meet was done rather quietly with Google foregoing any announcement that the name was changing.
It simply put out a blog post talking about Google Meet with the new name being the reference throughout. Never once though did it come out and say, “this is the new name of Hangouts Meet.” The same thing could happen with the chat app.
It’s all about Google
Hangouts is recognizable to anyone that may have used it enough or that still use it currently. But Google is a much more recognizable name.
It makes a whole lot of sense that Google would want to take a product like Hangouts Meet and shift the name to something that more people will be familiar with. Especially now. At a time when more people are working from home and students across the country are now being schooled at home as well.
Now that more people are using video conferencing tools on a daily basis, it seems like just as good of a time as any for Google to change the name of its own to something that people may not only recognize more, but trust more.
Google’s blog post even focuses heavily on how secure Google Meet is. Google may not have said anything about the reasoning for the rebrand, but keep an eye out for a name change for the Hangouts chat too.