Google Hangouts, Google’s IM client and the replacement for Google Talk, has gotten a massive set of updates, which are slowly trickling out to users. The biggest news of the bunch is Google Voice integration, which lets Google Voice users send and receive text and phone calls through the Hangouts app. There’s also a new Android app with a very green redesign and the ability to make VoIP calls from the app.
The Android app is significantly easier to understand than the old one. Contacts are in one tab, conversations are in another, and the last tab hosts the VoIP dialer. There’s a normal navigation drawer that lets you jump to the settings and other lesser-used parts of the app. There’s also a new Hangouts Dialer app in the Play Store, which gives users an easy way to add a direct link to the VoIP dialer to their home screen. The bad news is that there are now two dialers apps for Android.
The updated app is very green, but it doesn’t yet follow Google’s Material Design guidelines. This means that while it just got a redesign, it will have to be redesigned again sometime this year to match Android L.
When Hangouts launched over a year ago, the promise was that it would unify all of Google’s bespoke texting clients. At the time, that list included Google+ Messenger, Android’s stock SMS client, Google Talk, and Google Voice. While Talk and G+ Messenger quickly migrated and Hangouts was made the default SMS app in KitKat, Google Voice was always the one holdout. This week, though, that’s all changing, and Android Police is reporting that Voice support has finally started rolling out to Hangouts users.
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