Google Meet

Google Meet (previously known as Hangouts Meet) is a video-communication service created by Google that allows users to communicate with one another through video. One of the two applications that will take the place of Google Hangouts, the other being Google Chat, is Google Hangouts Alternative.

After launching Meet as an invite-only event in February 2017 and secretly releasing an iOS app the following month, Google officially released the service in March 2017. The programme, which was billed as a "enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts," was launched as a video conferencing software that can accommodate up to 30 people. It is available as a web application, an Android application, and an iOS application.

The above-mentioned capabilities of Google Meet were added to improve the original Hangouts programme, however several common Hangouts functionality were deprecated, notably the ability to see and talk with many participants at the same time. The number of video feeds that may be shown at one time has also been limited to 8 (although up to 4 streams can be displayed in the "tiles" arrangement), with priority given to those participants who have used their microphone the most recently. Additionally, elements such as the chatbox have been modified to overlay the video streams rather than shrinking the latter to suit the former's dimensions as before. Hangouts is slated to be decommissioned in the first half of 2021, according to Google.

In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the usage of Meet increased by a factor of 30 between January and April of that year, with 100 million users a day accessing Meet, compared to 200 million daily users using Zoom by the final week of April of that year. With delinquent accounts, Google has halted its normal 60-minute time restriction.