Google Chat's insistence that chat rooms be separated from people means that there are two Google Chat panels in the Gmail sidebar: one for people and one for group chats. The productivity turduckenįirst, there's the standard stuff that has existed since Google Talk landed inside Gmail: pop-up chat boxes and a list of contacts on the left side. If you uncheck both boxes, the Gmail app will go back to normal with no tab bar at the bottom at all. Just go to settings, tap on your email account, and uncheck "Chat" and a separate checkbox further down the page for Google Meet. Your Gmail app might have turned on Google Chat automatically, but you can disable the feature. I guess the messaging here seems to be that Google sees Gmail as the primary Google Chat app, but that's hard to believe. Again, this is not the way smartphones work (one icon per app, no apps inside of other apps), so it's a bad user experience for now. Gmail will actually detect this and recommend that you disable notifications for the Google Chat app and use Gmail exclusively. For every incoming message, Google Chat will beep, and then Gmail will beep, and you'll have two slots in the notification panel filled up. With Gmail sporting an entire Google Chat app inside the Gmail app, what happens when you do the obvious thing and install both Gmail and Google Chat? Uh, you get notified twice. This is not how smartphones are supposed to work. I would never want to tap on the Gmail icon to open Gmail only to find the app stuck in the Google Chat tab. I would never want to tap on the Gmail icon to access Google Chat. The standard interface for smartphones is one app icon per service. I don't really like the user experience though. The Google Chat tab in Gmail looks exactly like the Google Chat app-it's just piggybacking on Gmail's popularity. On the Play Store, the Gmail app has over 5 billion downloads, while Google Chat has over 5 million, so this is probably really helping engagement. The Gmail app, in full Google Chat mode, now has four tabs at the bottom: the Gmail tab (called "Mail"), two Google Chat tabs ("Chat" and "Room"), and finally a Google Meet tab. has always been a Google messaging client, but never the Gmail app. First of all, the mobile Gmail app is a Google Chat client. You can really tell that Google Chat is a product of the Google Workspace team because of its deep integration with Gmail-it's embedded way more than Google Talk or Google Hangouts were before it. Google Chat also adds emoji reactions to messages and offers Google's "smart reply" system, which generates very short canned responses to messages. If you're in a particularly active room, this will be very handy. Other than the basic messaging features, Google Chat now supports in group chats, just like Slack. There are pros and cons to both approaches. That link gets pasted in the chat for everyone to click on, rather than just ringing everyone's device like a phone call. Video calls are all done through Google Meet, with an enterprise-first user experience that generates a link to a video meeting. Every client has message search now, including the mobile apps, which is a big improvement over Google Hangouts. Just like Slack and Teams, Google Chat isn't end-to-end encrypted. You can send chats and share photos, videos, and documents, but there's no voice message option. While we're complaining, there's also no tablet interface.Įvery client is a fully functional IM app, and each one seems to have the exact same features. Hangouts used to have a Wear OS client and some Apple Watch support, though, so I'm hopeful new clients will arrive at some point. Right now, the only missing clients are for smartwatches-there is no love for Apple Watch or Wear OS yet. Google (when it's making good decisions) doesn't limit the availability of its products much, and Chat should work anywhere you've got Internet. For some people, limiting yourself to a certain brand of tech products (iMessage) or phones only (WhatsApp) isn't a convenient option. This was a big strength of Hangouts and a big strength of Google in general. All of these use your Google account for your identity, and you can be logged into all of them at once if you want. There are clients for Android and iOS, a website at, and integration with Gmail on the web and in the mobile app. The best feature of Google Chat is that it exists almost everywhere.
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