Google Chat review: Terrible as Slack clone, but good as a consumer chat app

Enlarge / Google Chat, in just some of its many form factors. (credit: Google)

Google Chat officially launched for consumers recently, and that means the time has come to dive back into everyone's favorite subject: Google messaging services!

Google Chat is the latest in Google's long and prodigious line of (usually) short-lived messaging applications, but this one is a bit more important than most of the others. While the "~2 years and under" club is packed full of losers—like Google Wave (2009-2010), Buzz (2010-2011), Disco (2011-2012), Google+ Messenger (2011-2013), Spaces (2016-2017), Allo (2016-2019), and YouTube Messages (2017-2019)—one continual throughline has been original Google Talk users. Google Talk was Google's inaugural chat application that started in 2005 (it's often unofficially nicknamed "GChat"). In 2013, Google Talk got an in-place upgrade to Google Hangouts, which was (mostly) compatible with Google's OG chat service. Now, Google Hangouts users will be seamlessly upgraded to Google Chat, resulting in 16 years of turbulent-but-functional Google messaging.

These days it feels like all I do is spread doom and gloom about Google's latest shutdowns or dead-on-arrival messaging app rollouts. But know up front that Google Chat is actually pretty good! Needing to be compatible with Google Hangouts—to date, Google's best-ever messaging app—means it's also a worthy successor to Google Hangouts. This app has lots of client support, online accounts instead of the limited phone number system pushed by Google Pay and Google Allo, and a smooth transition process for your existing chats and contacts. It's not as fully featured as more stable chat systems that have been around for years, but if you're looking for the basics across tons of devices, this 1.0 version of Google Chat is truthfully not bad.

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