Google's Hangouts messaging service has been at the epicenter of the company's efforts in a lot of areas: it's taken on video chat, Google Voice calling, and even SMS over the years. That's a lot of features (or cruft, depending on your feelings), and it's made Hangouts on Android feel really messy. Now, Android Police has apparently acquired Hangouts 4, the next version of the app, and it seems to have a much cleaner interface.

It eliminates the tab for people, moving that functionality over to the slide-out menu on the left. There's also a new "floating action button" that pops up a list of recent contacts along with options to start a video call. Users will be able to set statuses from mobile soon, and the chat interface does away with your avatar and generally looks a lot cleaner. It also gives faster access to sending things that aren't text, with one-button access for photos, location, emoji, and stickers.

As Android Police notes, this is an unreleased version of the app (and apparently it's not at all tablet-optimized yet either), so things can and probably will be tweaked before it's released. In the meantime, click through to see more images of the new interface.