tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo’s) successor, google chat.
tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo’s) successor, google chat.
I imagine this is still the case, I know as of a couple of years ago Google rewarded (with career advancement) innovation. So once a product matured there was no incentive to maintain it. This is also why Maps, Gmail etc goes through so many drastic overhauls.