Google announced an update to its Hangouts app for Android at an event in San Francisco today. Hangouts will be getting location sharing, animated gifs, and SMS integration. These features were popular requests from users.
Finding your friend is even easier now as you can send a precise location with Hangouts like you can with WhatsApp. Location sharing integrates with Google Maps and will show up in-line within your conversations.
Google loves animated gifs (as do I) so they’ve updated Google Hangouts to support animated gifs within conversations. Google has already integrated animated gifs into its social network, Google+ with animated profile cover photos and in posts.
Google has finally integrated SMS into Hangouts, putting an end to the many rumors about this feature and making it possible for Hangouts to be the only messaging app you need on Android. There’s no news about Google Voice integration into Hangouts.
Finally, Google has updated Hangouts video calls with automatic adjustments to compensate for bad webcam image quality as well as adding full screen video calls across all devices.
Google has not announced when this updated Google+ for Android will be rolling out. We’ll update you as soon as we find out.
