With the death of Google Hangouts, Google and iMessage have their last chance at best competition

Google Hangouts is set to die today. The mobile app has been separately directing people out of the service since July, but the last vestige of the web app, Hangouts, will be shut down today. For a short time, Hangouts was Google's best, most ambitious, and most popular messaging product, but after 5 billion downloads, Google moved on. Hangouts' close cousin, Google Chat, should now automatically import all your messages and contacts, but the new service is just a shadow of Hangouts' original plan. The shutdown of Hangouts is the latest chapter in the chaotic history of Google's messaging service. Google Talk launched 17 years ago, and Google still doesn't have a competitive messaging platform. Part of the reason we use Google's many messaging apps is that there is no reliable, stable messaging platform within Google. You can see the problem in the company's 2022 messaging lineup. The Google Workspace team built Google Chat — it was Google's business un...