Maybe it's because I'm a business guy, but the idea of creating different apps for messaging and video between consumers and businesses makes no sense to me. And if that's Google's strategy (rather than just having uncontrollable development teams cranking out competing apps as fast as they can), then it still makes no sense to m.
I don't want a dozen apps on my phone for related functionality. I don't want to convince my friends to load a dozen apps on their phone. I want an app that can do the video stuff. I want an app that can do slick instant messaging, or drop back to SMS. I want what Hangouts was supposed to be, before it started getting disassembled because someone decided that all the cool kids want a dozen specialty apps.
Google’s Hangouts still has a future: as an enterprise communication app
Today, Google launched Duo, its new mobile-only video chat app. But that’s only half of Google’s new messaging equation. The other half is Allo, its AI-enhanced texting app. Allo isn’t available…
TL;DR: It's really, really hard to make Hangouts work well at scale. Its model of keeping every logged-in device in synch is a hairy nightmare and causes the majority use case (1:1 messaging) to suffer. So that's been broken out to a separate app.