Serving as the successor to Google Hangouts for a while now, Google Chat has seen a couple of useful feature additions in the recent past. For instance, the web version of Chat received a Material Design refresh in April, followed by message quoting last month. Google is now announcing another update to the app aimed at hiding inactive chats and Spaces on the left-hand side of the screen.

The company made the announcement on the Workspace blog, adding that only direct messages and Spaces that have been inactive for a week will be hidden from the users' view. These threads will still be accessible by tapping the More button, though.

More importantly, this behavior is only triggered when there are more than 10 conversations or Spaces, as shown above. So if you don't have more than 10 chats or Spaces on Google Chat, you probably wouldn't even know this feature has rolled out. Google also clarified that pinned conversations wouldn't be hidden in this fashion. The goal is to have quick and easy access to the chats that matter to you rather than having an exhaustive list of names populating the screen.

The uncluttered conversations view should be available over the next few weeks for all Workspace and personal Google account holders. The company's phrasing also suggests that there are no toggles to turn, so everybody should be able to access the feature when the rollout has concluded sometime by mid-June.

Google Chat is finally starting to chart a course of its own, despite gaining the reputation of trying to be too much like Slack. Last October, the company picked up one of our favorite Slack features — the ability to create custom emoji. Similarly, the Google Chat team finally made it easier for users to initiate new group chats earlier this year.