About a month ago, Google shared their vision for the future of Gmail, which showed an email experience filled with Chat, Meet, and Rooms tabs. The focus for this new bloated experience was to bring an all-in-one location for you to get all of your work done without requiring so many external apps or having to leave Gmail.
That new vision for Gmail has started rolling out. Well, it’s rolling out to G Suite customers first, and even there it’s pretty limited.
To recap, Google is putting a new navigation bar at the bottom of Gmail on Android that will have tabs for Mail, Chat, Rooms, and Meet. The Mail tab is (obviously) for your Gmail, while Chat, Rooms, and Meet are a part of Google Chat and Google Meet. For many, the Meet tab has already popped up, whether you are G Suite or not. They are also integrating all of this into Gmail on the web too.
By selecting the Chat tab in the Android app, you’ll get to carry on your Google Chat conversations without having to open the Google Chat app. The same applies for Meet, where you can jump onto a video call from within Gmail. As for Rooms, well, that’s the group or topic or project area you would find in Chat, only now it’s located in Gmail too.
To get this new experience as a G Suite user, you’ll need your admin to setup your G Suite organization as “Chat preferred.” That will kill off the regular Hangouts app from working with your G Suite account and force everyone in the organization to adopt Google Chat (it has dark theme now!). This will allow Gmail to take on this new redesign, though.
Google says the rollout for the new experience will take about 15 days, assuming you have completed the task I just mentioned above.
It seems they want to copy Microsoft Teams. But Teams do not replace outlook, it supplements
Hopefully, the menu bar will disappear as you scroll through the inbox. The ONLY thing that I like about this new strategy is that I don’t have to download individual apps IF I have an opportunity to use Google Meet or Chat, but I don’t know anyone who uses them.
Sounds to me like the exclusion of Duo means that team needs to start looking for a new job soon
I have it. It doesn’t disappear. It’s a permanent space hog while scrolling through messages, although it doesn’t appear when reading or writing emails.
What about those on Google Voice that use the Hangouts (web) app for sms?
I thought they shut down hangouts for us free users… a year and a half ago?
That’s true, but it’s still available for G-Suite business users.
Where’s the cotton candy machine? They promised a cotton candy machine.
Hopefully this doesn’t come to regular users. Oh, and Inbox was still better