With the announcement of Allo and Duo at Google I/O last month, many — including me — thought that Google is done with Hangouts. Even though the company suggested otherwise, Google has always treated Hangouts like a step-child. With today’s update to its Android app though, the company is finally adding a number of enhancements to the app indicating that it has still not forgotten about the Google Talk successor.

Firstly, and perhaps finally, the Hangouts team over at Google has finally added support for Marshmallow’s Direct Share feature. This feature makes it possible to share content to your favorite contact in Hangouts direct from the Share menu itself. The feature has been added to every major messaging service out there, including WhatsApp and Telegram, so its a shame to see Google taking such a long time to add it to its own messaging app.

Additionally, Google is finally adding the ability to share group invitation links from Hangouts. This allows one to simply paste the Hangouts group chat URL for others to join, instead of having to manually add people to the group. There does not seem to be any restriction on who can share a group link with others, and once a person join a group, he or she will get access to the complete chat history as well.

Google has also made a minor UI tweak with this update by adding a drop shadow beneath the Send button. The size of the preview images that you share in a Hangouts conversation has now also been reduced to make them more bearable.

Hangouts 10 is slowly rolling out through the Google Play Store, though you can always manually sideload the APK from here. Are you going to stick by Hangouts or have you already abandoned it in favor of something else?