Google has begun rolling out an update on the Play Store for the company’s chat application Google Hangouts. The update is said to add support for recording and sending video messages to your friends and family.
With the update installed, you’ll be able to send out video files to contacts, which is ideal if you wish to leave a quick message. It’s possible to record one through the app, or select one from on-board storage. As an added bonus, while the Android platform has had to endure a painful wait for this feature to finally hit the store, it appears as though 1080p is supported while the iOS app can still only handle 360p, disappointing for iOS users of Google Hangouts.
The feature of sending video messages is a feature you would think would be default for a messaging application in 2016, but Google have been slow to deploy video messaging to their main messaging platform. If Google ever wants to compete with the likes of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Apple’s iMessage, Hangouts needs to have easy to use features such as Video messaging and to make it easy enough for novices to use, A lot of people do not know that they are using iMessage when sending messages from an iPhone.
Looking ahead, Google planning to launch a pair of new messaging applications named Allo and Duo, one featuring none other than Google’s Assistant — because chatbots are now a thing again. Google Hangouts has been the default messaging application for Google users, which now gets even more confusing with the future release of Allo and Duo.
The latest update for Google Hangouts should be hitting the Google Play store as we speak, so keep an eye out for that. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
[button link=”http://phandroid.com/2016/07/12/hangouts-video-messaging-android/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Phandroid[/button]
