Google has officially launched its enterprise communications tool Currents, marking the long-awaited death of Google+. 

Currents is available now to G Suite customers, offering organisations a tool where employees can post and comment on discussions and view content in a news feed called “home stream”.

The new service has replaced the Google+ icon in G Suite and also Google’s apps for Android and iOS. Google+ accounts were shut down last year after failing to attract users and repeated security issues.  

Despite not having enough users for its parent company’s liking, Google+ still managed to suffer a data leak that affected up to half a million users in 2018. An internal review found that a flaw in the social network’s APIs allowed malicious apps to extract data from users profiles and the service was shut down shortly after. 

Rather than delete the whole thing, Google has opted to rebrand and reposition the services as an enterprise comms tool – similar to Facebook’s Workplace. As such, any lingering Google+ Enterprise users will be transitioned to Currents from 6 July and Google+ links will redirect to Currents URLs.

The Currents interface, which includes Home Stream, can be ordered chronologically or by relevance and allows links, images, text, polls and content from Google Drive accounts to be shared throughout your organisation. 

These are not the only changes to G Suite, as Google is also rolling out a dark mode for Docs, Sheets and Slides on Android. The tech giant said this should be available within the next two weeks, with users required to go into the respective app’s settings to make the change. If you already have a dark mode theme on your system, the apps will have it enabled automatically. 

It follows an announcement the company made last year to deliver dark mode to all of its first-party apps. It has slowly added the capability to a number of services, including Gmail and Google Calendar. 

The function has become very popular on Android and iOS apps for reportedly reducing battery consumption and also its sleek look on mobile devices.