Google today announced a deeper integration between Gmail on mobile and its Meet video conferencing service. Now, if you use Gmail on Android or iOS and somebody sends you a link to a Meet event, you can join the meeting right from your inbox.
That obviously isn’t radically different from how things work today, where Gmail will take you right into the Meet app, but the major difference here is that you won’t have to install the dedicated Meet app anymore to join a call from Gmail.
The second and maybe bigger update — and this one won’t launch until a few weeks from now — is that the mobile Gmail app will also get a new Meet tab at the bottom of the screen. This new tab will show you all your upcoming Meet meetings in Google Calendar and will allow you to start a meeting, get a link to share or schedule a meeting in Calendar.
If you’re not a Meet power user, then you can turn this tab off, too, which I assume a lot of people will do, given that not everybody will want to give up screen estate in their email app for a dedicated Meet button.
It’s interesting to see that Google is trying to bring Gmail and Meet so closely together. The act of moving between two different apps for email and meetings never felt like a burden, but Google clearly wants more people to be aware of Meet (especially now that it offers a free tier) and remove any friction that could keep potential users from using it. The company already integrated Meet into the Gmail web app, where it felt pretty natural given that Gmail on the web long featured support for Hangouts (RIP, I guess?) and its predecessors. On mobile, though, it feels a bit forced. Hangouts, after all, was never a built-in part of Gmail on mobile either.
