Google aims to unify Gmail, Drive, Hangouts products

Tech giant Google is working on another communications application for workplaces.

This app will combine several different platforms Google already operates, according to a new report from The Information, reported The Verge.

Different Google services that the company sells to businesses, including parts of its G Suite like corporate-grade Gmail and Google Drive, will be unified under the new product.

It would also bundle together the various, somewhat confusing variants of Hangouts.

Google's Hangouts was once a consumer-focused communications platform. It is now geared toward the enterprise customers.

It has since been split into Hangouts Meet, a video chat app, and Hangouts Chat, a real-time text-based successor to Gchat.

This could be an allusion that Google may be introducing yet another communications platform, or something similar, into an already confounding ecosystem of existing services.

One Google chat app comprising all

To take the stock, Google has Hangouts, an app it is slowly phasing out in favour of Hangouts Chat and Meet.

However, all three are coexisting right now after Google delayed the shutdown of the standard Hangouts.

There is also the version which still includes the consumer version of Hangouts as the above mentioned shutdown pertains only to the G Suite version.

That consumer list also includes a Rich Communication Services (RCS) based Android chat app named Chat and the consumer video chat app Duo.

It used to include the Gmail alternative email client Inbox and the mobile chat app Allo. However, those two were unceremoniously killed.

Then there's Android Messages, Google's custom SMS app that is supposed to be superseded by the RCS-based Chat, and the defunct Gchat, which got replaced by Hangouts a few years back.

Google Voice still exists, although Google has said in the past that it wants to integrate many of Voice's features into Hangouts Meet.

So Voice may one day go away as well.

This move from Google could be a way for to win over enterprise customers who have moved all their communication, chat and otherwise, into central collaboration hubs like Microsoft Teams and Slack.

A variety of voice and video-based calling features is provided by both of those products; and are also integrated with countless other productivity apps and workplace tools like Dropbox and Salesforce.

Google is yet to have something similar as part of G Suite.