Google Chat, the successor to Google Hangouts, is receiving an update that aims to improve conversation organization. In a recent announcement on the Workspace blog, Google revealed that inactive chats and Spaces will be hidden from view on the left-hand side of the screen. This change will only apply to direct messages and Spaces that have been inactive for a week. However, users will still be able to access these threads by tapping the More button.

Improved Organization: Google Chat’s Update Hides Inactive Chats and Spaces

This update is triggered when there are more than 10 conversations or Spaces present. If a user has fewer than 10 chats or Spaces, they may not even notice the feature rollout. Pinned conversations will not be affected by this change, ensuring easy access to important chats. The goal is to provide users with a streamlined and uncluttered conversations view, allowing them to focus on the chats that matter most.

The improved conversations view will be gradually rolled out over the next few weeks for all Workspace and personal Google account holders. According to Google, there are no toggles to enable or disable this feature, implying that it will be available to all users once the rollout is complete, expected by mid-June.

Google Chat has been making strides to establish its own identity, moving away from its initial similarities to Slack. In October, Google introduced the ability to create custom emoji, a popular feature from Slack. Earlier this year, the Google Chat team also simplified the process of initiating new group chats.

Overall, this update to Google Chat focuses on enhancing conversation organization by hiding inactive chats and Spaces, providing users with a cleaner and more focused interface.

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With Hangouts nearing the end of its life, Google is working on expanding its support for its Chat and Spaces platforms. Now, the company has even rolled out an update for Gmail for Android, which brings new status bar icons that helps users differentiate from Chat and Spaces.

For those unaware, new message alerts for either Google Chat (basically a chat app like WhatsApp) and Spaces (Slack-like platform) were the same. Notifications on the status bar featured a filled in message bubble with another one behind it. But now, the Search Engine giant is working on making the two platforms more distinct from one another thanks to a revamp in status bar icons (Via 9To5Google).

Now, the Chat app will have a single message bubble that is outlined and has an empty interior. On the other hand, Spaces will now have three people standing next to each other. In other words, the company is also using the bottom bar tab icons for the status bar as well. This also matches the Gmail icon for email and even adds a quality of life improvement that helps people, like professional enterprise users to quickly figure out which platform the message belongs to.

As of right now, the new status bar icons has only been seen on a singly Android device, which runs the version 2022.02.20.x of Gmail. This build has not been widely released at the moment. Although, we can expect to see the change arrive in more smartphones in the near future. Notably, the change also arrives as Gmail for iOS begins showing the Chat sender’s profile photo starting from this month.

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