However, this Google Hangouts recording feature is only available if you have subscribed to the paid service of G Suite Enterprise or G Suite Enterprise Education. Therefore, they can record all the video meetings and webinars for records and future references. The reason why professionals prefer Google Hangouts over its competitors is that there is a default recording option available. There are some pretty good choices, but Hangouts is still best in the browser, even if some of us don’t want to be locked in the browser.Way 3. When I go back into Gmail, I hate seeing unread Hangout conversations when I’ve already completed those conversations.Īt the end of the day, there really isn’t any great Hangouts desktop app for the Mac.

They don’t include some of the bells and whistles and they don’t do a good job at marking things as read in Gmail. Messages and Adium work with Hangouts too, but only for basic text messages. They look a lot like Hangouts Plus though. There’s also BetterApp and Chat for Hangouts but I haven’t tried them. Definitely worth checking out since it’s free, but it’s starting to show the lack of updates as some things don’t seem to work like they should. It’s a decent app, great interface, spell check, and free. This is backwards to me.įlamingo was the hot new app not long ago, but recently it went free and then I think development stopped, or slowed way down. The main downsides are that it’s a paid app, although not too spendy, and it has a weird “feature” where it makes the active chat tab grey and background tabs white. It’s a pretty good app that looks similar to Hangouts. I also purchased Hangouts Plus not long ago. So far, so good, however it’s currently in development and does lack some features like spell check. I accidentally stumbled upon it the other day and I’ve been using it ever since. It looks great, works pretty darn good, and it’s free currently. My goal is a Hangout app that can live without a browser.

That works for some, but it’s either out of sight, out of mind, or it’s jumping up in front of everything else annoying me. I’ve been on the lookout for a Google Hangouts desktop app for the Mac and there are actually few decent choices out there.įirst off, I don’t want to run a Chrome extension and I don’t want to have to keep Gmail open in the background.

Google hangouts on mac