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Google has just started rolling out Hangouts 5.0 for Android. Despite the major jump in version number, the latest release of Hangouts does not bring anything new in terms of features.
However, the update does seem to bring about some major performance improvements, minor changes in animations, and fixes the broken animate GIF support. Google has also included a splash screen with this update that shows up when you open the app, though it is there for less a couple of seconds.
I played around with the app for a few minutes and have noticed a huge performance improvements. In Hangouts 4.x, I had to sometime exit and re-enter a conversation to show up some of the messages that I had just sent. This bug no longer seems to be present in Hangouts 5.0.
The APK of the app is already available for download over at APK Mirror. You can, however, always wait for Google to push the update to your device through the Google Play Store but that can take a fair bit of time.
If you have noticed any other change in Hangouts 5.0 for Android, do drop in a comment below and let us know.
