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Google Hangouts has finally reached 1 Billion downloads inside the Play Store, an achievement that has only been achieved by a handful of applications. This milestone marks the eighth Google-owned app that has received at least 1 Billion downloads, in addition to these 7 Google apps, there have been only 3 other apps which have reached said number, all created by Facebook. Google Hangouts is one of the few Google apps that isn’t as well received as the company would hope, this is due to numerous complaints, ranging from security issues to not following their own Material Design guidelines. Even if the Hangouts application has gone through several rough patches, it has come a long way since its release on May, 2013, and will without a doubt continue to evolve into an even more useful service.
Hangouts reached the 1 Billion downloads milestone after two different messaging services, namely Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger. This fact may lead users into questioning just how reliable is Hangouts as a messaging platform and how much better it might be than its competition. Both Whatsapp and Messenger crossed the milestone a few weeks ago, not too separated from Google Hangouts, but still significantly earlier.
Something that should be noted from this milestone is that even if the Google Hangouts application already surpassed 1 billion downloads, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has the same number of users. The 1 billion downloads milestone, only represents the number of different devices in which the app has been downloaded just once; re-installations aren’t taken into consideration as a new download. The total number of downloads includes smartphones and tablets that might no longer be functional, which is a rather large percentage. Hangouts most likely faces several hundred million users in a daily basis, but it is believed that this is due to the fact that the application comes pre-installed as the default SMS client in numerous Android smartphones. Google Hangouts has a fairly major update coming in the near future, the application will be finally updated to version 4.0 which will address many of the issues that users have been suffering from for a long time now.
