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by hbn 867 days ago
You should check out the rabbit hole of Google's various payment systems/apps. GPay, Google Pay, Google Wallet, Android Pay, etc.

All the different the ways those brands (and more?) were used to describe multiple services and apps that had wildly different capabilities, sometimes varying by region, with several instances of them bringing back a previously used name for something completely different.

1 comments

There for a while, Google had two different applications called "Google Messenger"
They also had an app called duo. And an app called Meet. And then Duo was renamed to "Meet", and Meet was renamed to "Meet (original)"
Oh you're only scraping the surface of the iceberg of Google's nonsense messaging offerings. This is from 2021 but has a good rundown.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

At the same time as Duo, Google launched Allo, another messaging app, neither of which should be confused with Messenger, Google’s messaging app for Android. Combined, allo and duo approximated the functionality of Hangouts, which was also split at the same time into Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Don’t confuse Hangouts Meet with Google Meet, Google’s current Zoom competitor. Hangouts Chat and Meet later become Google Chat, not to be confused with GChat, which is what many people called Google Talk for ten years. GChat was replaced by Hangouts less than a year before Hangouts was split into two Hangouts services. If you signed up for Google Voice, Google Talk would let you receive voicemails.

Yes, Google has a $1.7 trillion market cap, why do you ask?