Google reportedly testing a messaging app called Spaces for all your group chats
There have been plenty of rumors that Google was hard at work on building a new messaging app, dating all the way back to late last year, just not like this. Spaces — a new app Googles’ is reportedly already dogfooding — is a little different. Unlike Google’s rumored smart messaging app with chat bots, Spaces centers around group conversations and nothing else. It’s a lot like what we saw with Facebook Groups back in 2014.
You build a space (Android Fans, Comic Book Club, etc.) and add people to the chat for group conversations. I know, it doesn’t sound too groundbreaking, but where Spaces differs from others is how it ties in with Google Search to quickly and easily search for links, photos, videos. After it’s been posted in a chat, you can go back and see a history of everything everyone has posted, making it super easy to see what’s been shared.
Although it sounds really basic, Spaces could be a useful for keeping up on big group chats which, like most things, is sort of a mess right now in Hangouts. Apparently, Spaces is part of a non-public beta in the Google Play Store — where it’s using an internal serve — so sideloading the APK wouldn’t work. When it does go live, you’ll find it at the URL here in case you wanna keep an eye on it.