About a month ago, Google shared its vision for the future of Gmail, which showed an email experience filled with Chat, Meet and Rooms tabs. The focus for this new inflated experience was to bring an all-in-one location for you to get all your work done without needing so many external apps or leaving Gmail.
That new vision for Gmail has begun to roll. Well, it first goes out to customers of G Suite, and even there it’s pretty limited.
To recreate, Google has placed a new navigation bar at the bottom of Gmail on Android that will have tabs for Mail, Chat, Rooms, and Meet. The Email tab is (obviously) for your Gmail, while chat, chat rooms, and chats are part of Google Chat and Google Meet. For many, the Meet tab tab has already appeared, whether you are G Suite or not. They also integrate this into Gmail on the web.
By selecting the Chat tab in the Android app, you can continue your Google Chat chats without opening the Google Chat app. The same goes for Meet, where you can jump on a video call from Gmail. As for the rooms, well, that’s the group or topic area you’ll find in Chat, only it’s now in Gmail as well.
To gain this new experience as a G Suite user, your admin will need to set up your G Suite organization as “Chat Preferences.” That will kill the regular Hangouts app from working with your G Suite account and force everyone in the organization to adopt Google Chat (it has dark theme now!). However, Gmail will be able to accept this new redesign.
Google says the rollout for the new experience will take about 15 days, assuming you complete the task I did just above.
// Updates from G Suite
