A very brief history of every Google messaging app

Over the past 15 years, Google has introduced more than a dozen messaging services spanning text, voice, and video calling. This week, the company’s efforts culminated in the general availability of Google Chat, a combination of Slack / Discord-style rooms with more traditional messaging.

It’s the sort of announcement that might have been expected to bring some consistency to the company’s muddled messenger messaging, but — as is traditional for Google in this area — there’s plenty of confusion to go around.

For one thing, Google Chat is the name fans have affectionately used to refer to Google’s original messaging service, Google Talk, for many years. Is this a coincidence that brings Google’s messaging ouroboros full circle, or is it meant to entice GChat fans into actually using the company’s latest attempt?

For another, Google Chat contains its own messaging rooms that were previously called Rooms but will soon “evolve” into something called Spaces, even though Google introduced a different messaging app called Spaces in 2016.

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