Hangouts for Android is basically enhanced text messaging. The app works fine enough, however, it’s a little redundant and just points to a shift in Google’s ideology, which is becoming more and more restrictive, like iOS.

Hangouts is a perfectly good messaging app, if not totally pointless. I was perfectly fine with my standard text messaging app, but ok, it seems Google has taken a page from Apple’s book and is intent on herding us like sheep with uniformity. It’s disappointing that Google has chosen to take this tact, but there’s little to be done about it but acquiesce.

Hangouts allows you to send and receive various messages and multimedia content, once called MMS and texts; now it all just comes under a hipster name, but that’s essentially all Hangouts really is. Oh, and you can add a healthy dose of privacy intrusion while you’re at it. Unlike Google Talk, Hangouts does not have an invisible mode, which means there’s really no way to effectively prevent your cyber stalkers from hunting you down and knowing your every move.

The biggest flaw with hangouts is if you have multiple devices using the same account, messages are duplicated to all of them; so you’re essentially being bombarded by repeat notifications unless you muddle through all the setup options and manually turn certain features off, or deactivate the app entirely on certain devices.

Everything functioned fairly well, but I did xperience hangs and glitches here and there. I think for those who are heavy into social and real world networking, this app will be a dream. But for those of us who enjoy a layer of privacy in our lives, Hangouts is just another example of Google's new restrictive and intrusive practices.

Hangouts is a decent messaging app but I’m concerned with Google’s new shift to creating all these mandatory and repetitively redundant apps; Google+, Google Play Games, now Hangouts. More and more, this little droid seems to be changing into a clone, and I’m not entirely enthusiastic about that. However, this is a decent app for those who find it useful.