Google’s Hangouts Meet is now just Google Meet

Remote workers, meeters, streamers, and hangers-out, take note: Google’s Hangouts Meet is no longer called Hangouts Meet; it’s now called Google Meet.

The rebrand was made apparent yesterday in a Google Cloud blog post written by two of Google’s directors of product management, Karthik Lakshminarayanan and Smita Hashim. The blog post lists a number of privacy measures that Google Meet employs to keep remote meetings from being hijacked, and also refers to the service as Google Meet. Android Police found that a number of support pages had been updated with the new title as well.

In an email to The Verge, Google confirmed that it has officially changed the service’s name. Google also confirmed that Meet is an independent part of G Suite, the portfolio of business services that also includes brands such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Hangouts Chat, the text-messaging arm of the Hangouts brand, is also part of the suite.

The rebrand still appears to be a work in progress. As of this writing, the service is still called Hangouts Meet by Google in the iOS App Store, and its G Suite landing page also retains the old name. And while G Suite’s website lists “Meet” as an included service at the top of the page, “Hangouts Meet” is still referenced in a list lower down.

The rebrand comes at a time when Google Meet has seen explosive growth as the COVID-19 pandemic forces workplaces to move their meetings online. Google Meet’s usage is currently 25 times what it was in January, Google revealed late last month, and the service is gaining more than 2 million new users a day.