If there is one thing we love it’s having a large company use one of their popular products to push another less popular product on their user base. What we love more is when this semi-monopolistic behaviour can be undone. Enter Google’s merging of Google Meet with Gmail.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a link to a video chat service I don’t use taking up room in my Email User interface. We know it’s not a huge thing, but it’s a bit of a power move by Google to have “helpfully” force every Gmail user on the planet to have Meet integrated into their UI, even if the pandemic reasoning seems ok on the surface.
Luckily however Google has provided a way to turn off the new integration and get back your 15mm of space. Open the Gmail app and tap on the hamburger menu and swipe down to settings. Tap on the account you want to change and scroll down to the new “Meet” section in the menu. From there you can toggle “Show the Meet tab for video calling” on or off.
That’s it, it’s that simple, no more Meet in the Gmail app. Overall we think it’s great that Google is rapidly iterating and improving their video chat features during the global pandemic, that is objectively a good thing. Forcing integrations into their products like Calendar and Gmail feels a little heavy-handed, especially without an opt-out, or even better opt-in, choice during onboarding.
