14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been a couple of really busy days at Google, since the company released more features for Google Now on Tap service yesterday and today it has pushed out a new update to its Hangouts messaging application on Android, according to Android Police.
Google first introduced the Direct Share feature in the Android Marshmallow OS last year. The tool allows users to directly share content like images, videos, and links with Hangouts contacts that they frequently interact with. It seems that Google included only this major feature in the new version 10 of Hangouts for Android and iOS.
It doesn’t seem to be much of a change inside the application, but it does improve user experience since you won’t need to search for and select a certain contact from the list, as they appear in the share menu.
However, it’s quite unclear why Google took so long to implement such an important feature into one of its biggest messaging applications, considering that Direct Share had made its debut about 8 months ago.
Hangouts saw decreasing popularity in the market of Android messaging apps, with strong contenders like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and even WeChat or Line in Asia. That being said, even Google started shifting its attention towards a new messaging app, Allo, which was announced during this year’s edition of Google I/O.
The update is available on Google Play, or users can download the APK and install it on their smartphones.