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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

They've recently shoehorned "Chat" tab into Gmail, of all places! So no, folding together apps is not always a good thing.

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Google's chat products have been integrated with gmail since the start, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk

No, it was different. It was never in the same app. Merging chat history into it was the best thing about it, and you could use it with any xmpp client (disclosure: I was developing one such client).

But it never wasted valuable screen estate in a mail app to make you know that you can also chat. There was a separate app for that.

> It was never in the same app.

Yes it was. Look at the last screenshot in this article from 2008:

https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/the-evolution-of-pre-launc...

Maybe I’m looking at the wrong screenshot, but they’re all web desktops. I assumed the previous poster was talking about mobile apps, where screen real estate is really at a premium.

The previous poster was probably talking about web Gmail where they recently added sidebar with Chat and Meet. The Gmail app, iOS and Android, doesn't have that. They did put "Chat" pane in the iPad Gmail app but seem to have removed it.

> web Gmail where they recently added sidebar with Chat and Meet

Chat has always been there though. I've used it every day for almost a decade on my work gmail account (I don't open the separate page or use a standalone client).

The web app used to have a Hangouts sidebar which was replaced by a Hangouts Chat sidebar which was eventually renamed to just Chat.

I was talking about mobile app. It has a tab bar at the bottom with now chat section, the option to remove it is buried rather deep in the settings.

Web version of Gmail did have a Gtalk widget, but it could be collapsed / hidden with a couple of easy clicks

Worse, I prefer to chat in a separate app on the phone, so I can more easily multitask between chat and email, but the separate Chat app has less functionality than Chat in the Gmail app.

That's not recent - I was using that in 2010...

There wasn't chat in Gmail Android app until recently. It appeared sometime during the pandemic.

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