You are probably already privy to the news that Google will be doing away with Hangouts sooner or later, and in doing so, they've broken it apart into two different services for G Suite enterprise users: Hangouts Meet, which serves as a platform for video chatting for online meetings, and Hangouts Chat, which helps users within an organization communicate easily and painlessly. While this solution works alright, it can be confusing for some enterprise users who may not be able to immediately tell the difference between the two apps just by the name, especially given how the regular Hangouts app still exists. Now, Google is aiming to fix this inconsistency and try and fix fragmentation by merging most of their work/enterprise-oriented solutions into a whole new service.

This new Google messaging solution aims to be a unified messaging platform for businesses, so that means that it will be available for G Suite accounts only. It would contain both recently-arisen variants of Hangouts for business users and not only that, it could even contain elements from Gmail as well as from Google Drive, and may even overtake these two apps entirely for G Suite accounts. This would mean that the app, instead of just being yet-another messaging app from Google, would act instead as a central hub where you could check everything work-related.

We aren't really sure how such an app would work, but my personal guess would be something like Slack with a lot more capability. It's not clear when, or if, Google will launch this service, which has no name yet. But if we're lucky, it may be something we'll get to see during Google I/O 2020 in May. It's still too early to tell as Google hasn't even done an official announcement yet, and everything is still within the realm of speculation.

Source: The Information