Google Hangouts
An app that lets you message friends, create free videos, and voice calls, or you can have a conversation with a single person or a group. Other features include the ability to send and receive both text and video messages, have chats with one person or a group of a hundred. You can make calls to anyone anywhere in the world.
Google Hangouts was created in 2013 and has been given 3.9 stars in the Google play store and has over one billion downloads. This app is very popular because of the amount of features it has, and also because it can be used by so many people around the world. Many people use the Google Hangouts app because they can stay in touch with friend, they can send messages to a whole group and even have a live video chat with up to 10 people. The Google Hangouts app is perfect for people who like to be social but can’t always be with friends who are far away.
Pros
Supports Voice, Text, and Video Chat: If you like an app that lets you text, chat, and allows voice calls, then Google Hangouts is for you. If you have friends around the world that you find it hard to keep in contact with because it is costly, then no need to worry. Google Hangouts lets you do a lot for free. Voice call inside the United States are free, and only costs pennies to anyone outside the United States.
Better Notifications: With the new Google Hangouts app, you will not have to worry about being interrupted by every single person who messages you. Now you can keep on doing what you are doing and wait to answer all of your friends who want your attention. If you don’t like being interrupted while you are talking to or messaging your friends, then you don’t have to.
Cons
Requires Google+ Account for Extended features: In order to access some of the more enhanced features you must sign up for a Google+ account. If you are not a huge fan of Google, and do not want to sign up for another account where you will have to remember another user name and password, this might mean you can only use basic features of the app.
Strange notifications: while notifications have greatly improved since the previous versions, they can be a bit tricky at times. Per instance, notifications will appear sporadically trough a system only Google Hangouts knows. It can be annoying at times and Google should definitely look into this on next updates.
In Conclusion
The Google Hangouts app is a very popular app that allows you to do a multitude of things. With this app you can text, call, video message, and many other things as well. The app is very popular because it includes so many things that you would have to download multiple apps in order to do. The notifications with this app will allow you to keep on with whatever you are doing, so that you are not interrupted while you are on an important voice call. However, the regularity of the notifications needs some improvement.
Like many Google apps, there are some features of this app which require that you have a Google+ account to access. So if you don’t want to bother getting another account to remember, you can stick to the basic features. All in all, Google Hangouts has created an app that lets you do multiple things which you could not do with any other single app and gets a definite thumbs up from us.