Today the folks from Google are issuing the first update to their popular Hangouts app that replaced Google Talk last month. It wasn’t quite the unified chat everyone was expecting, but Hangouts is pretty nice. Today they’ve pushed the first update out for their new app with a few notification fixes and tweaks, but nothing too significant. No Google Voice or SMS integration yet either.
The new staged rollout thing with the Play Store is actually starting to be bothersome. My Play Store shows a new update available today, June 5th, but it’s not yet available for my device. Even though a few other phones I have here have updated without any issues. This won’t be changing, so moving on.
The update to Hangouts is minor and addresses issues with notifications and audio, mostly for Gingerbread. As we saw from the distribution numbers this week, Gingerbread is still on a significant number of devices so this should make many users happy. Here’s the small changelog.
● Fixed a problem where you could receive two notifications for a message: one from Hangouts, one from the old Talk app.
● Audio issues in video calls on some Android 2.3x (Gingerbread) devices, including the Droid Charge, should now be resolved.
● Bug fixes and better performance.
We were hoping the notification changes would allow custom notification settings for mobile and desktop, separate from each other, but that didn’t happen. Instead they’ve fixed a double notification issue for the few having that problem. It then looks like some audio issues and calling problems from Gingerbread have been fixed, as well as the usual “bug fixes and better performance” comment we see with updates.
We’re still hoping that Google has big plans for Hangouts, and can’t wait to see what they add next. We’re expecting more features to launch in Hangouts along side Android 4.3 Jelly Bean – whenever that gets released – so stay tuned and expect the update for Hangouts to hit your device soon.
SOURCE: Play Store
Anyone experiencing issues with Notifications in general now?
I get no notifications when the application is closed. I only can see them when I open the app. In other words I don’t know when someone messaged me.
Since Hangouts installed on my Droid 4, my voice commands for bluetooth stopped working. This is extremely annoying. What good is bluetooth without voice commands??? Who is responsible for this? When will it be fixed? Is anyone else having a similar problem?