Google Hangouts users have been questioning the future of the platform lately, as Google have been displaying a slight reluctance in releasing updates for it. Recently, there have been some good news on that front, however – those who use google Voice will now be able to send MMS natively through Verizon, which means that all major American carriers now support the service. Combined with the fact that Voice now also natively supports MMS for photo messaging, this means that users of all US carriers can now send MMS through the service. This ends the annoying requirement of having to send e-mails with attachments in order to transfer a picture.
This is good news for Hangouts users because Google have been making serious moves in the direction of unifying their Voice and Hangouts platforms, which means that somewhere down the line, the new MMS functionality will become available to the Hangouts community as well. When exactly this would happen remains unclear, as Google have been quiet about the future merging of the two services. It’s likely that the process will happen in incremental steps and not in one single move, as has been evidenced by recent developments in Voice and Hangouts.
The company has been making lots of changes to both platforms, however, in preparation for their merge, and things look to be shaping up quite nicely so far. Voice is already integrated into Hangouts in the Android operating system, another one of Google’s projects, but the company is yet to properly combine the two services into one unified platform, which they have expressed desire for in the past. Of course, given the scale of both projects, merging them would be a serious task, and it’s understandable why it might take some time before this becomes a reality.
It remains unclear whether one of the two platforms will be shut down when the merge eventually occurs, or if their combination will be carried out more smoothly, but Google have shown that they are willing to kill off their services in the past, when it aligns with their plans for the future. Various examples of failed Google experiments have concluded with the shutdown of the corresponding service, although in the case of the Voice/Hangouts merge, it will be more about removing a duplicate from the scene.
Google’s Voice platform is already becoming a serious player in the market for communications in the US, and it’s slowly making its way to the rest of the world as well. Some carriers have expressed concern at the existence of the service, claiming that it’s an unfair move by a company with a strong position, but no changes have resulted from those debates.