In a blog post made yesterday by Google’s directors of product management, Karthik Lakshminarayanan and Smita Hashim, Google confirmed that Hangouts Meet is no longer a Hangouts product, and will simply be referred to as Google Meet. The post lists a number of privacy measures that rebranded product employs to keep remote meetings from being hijacked.
According to Android Police, support pages have almost all been updated with language calling the service Google Meet, where they previously said Hangouts Meet. The official Hangouts Meet app for Android still retains its old name. However, Android Police suspects that change will follow once the company decides on a new visual identity that doesn’t include the old Hangouts logo, as the app currently does.
The Verge also disclosed that in an email it received, Google confirmed that it has officially changed the service’s name. Meet is confirmed to be an independent part of G Suite, the portfolio of business services that also includes brands such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Hangouts Chat, the text-messaging arm of the Hangouts brand, is also part of the suite.
As the COVID-19 pandemic forces workplaces to hold meetings online, Google Meet is suspected to be Google’s response to the explosive growth it is experiencing. Google revealed late March that the service gained more than 2 million new users daily.
