Hangouts 5.0 squashes bugs, kills off home screen widget

Now, Hangouts 5.0 has finally landed, bringing with it a few bug fixes as well as minor enhancements. Now, the checkbox sports a brighter shade of green.

The latest version of Hangouts, as per Phandroid’s Derek Ross, brings improvements in the overall performance, adds a fix for broken gif images, and comes with a splash screen. Luckily, the APK has surfaced, for everyone to side-load on their device.

The search giant has started rolling out the Hangouts app via Google Play. If you have the widget on one of your home screens, you’ll see it replaced with a dialogue box that says, “Widget no longer available”. Oh, and Google Voice users can now initiate MMS group messages instead of just being able to reply to them - suddenly, Google Voice has become as usable as traditional texting has always been.

It seems that Google has improved the applications’ performance as well. However, as usual, Google has chose to do a slow roll out with the update to 5.0, so you may be waiting a few days or even weeks to get the update on your device. Now, users should expect a speedier Hangouts version.

The Google Play link to Hangouts has been placed below, but for those here who are not patient, you can sideload the apk by downloading it from here. Simply download that onto your Android device and then head into settings, go into the security settings and make sure “Unknown Sources” are checked. Now, users should tap on the downloaded APK file.