Google has confirmed that it is rebranding Hangouts Meet, which will now be known as Google Meet as the company is ditching the Hangouts branding. The development was spotted by Android Police which noticed that a blog post from the company mentions the service as simply Google Meet.
In line with this, the support page for the service have almost all been updated with language calling the service Google Meet, where they previously said Hangouts Meet. However, the official Android application still has the Hangouts Meet name.
Later, Google confirmed to Android Police that Hangouts Meet branding will be retired, and the product will be known as Google Meet going forward. The rebrand will happen on a rolling basis which means that it will take time for it to disseminate globally.
The name change takes place at an interesting time as the world is witnessing surge in communications apps, especially for work from home setup and Google is attempting to get a bigger share and compete with the likes of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.
So, it makes sense for Google to put its own branding ahead of the product instead of Hangouts which has seen almost all of its service shut down. With the change it name, we could see the company fully roll out the service, which is currently for G Suite members only.
