The beginning of the end has come for google-hangoutyes After ten years of life and countless adjustments, the messaging client will cease to exist in November. google started migration of accounts from Hangouts to Chat with a view to disconnecting the service by the end of the year. Although the end of the platform was sung with the arrival of Meet and Chat five years ago, some users continued to use it.
After starting the migration of its business clients, the technology company will now do the same with users with personal accounts. If you use Hangouts on the mobile app you will start to see notices that it is time to migrate to Chat. This will also apply to those using the Chrome extension, suggesting they switch to the Chat web app.
Hangouts users within Gmail will migrate to Chat once Google implements the client within its email service.
While we encourage everyone to switch to Chat, Hangouts on the web will continue to be available through the end of this year. Users will see an in-product notice at least one month before Hangouts on the web starts redirecting to Chat on the web.
The transition process will be transparent and Hangouts conversations will be available in Chat. Still, Google recommends that make a backup of your information through Takeout. You only need to log in with your user account to download the data.
The closure of Hangouts and the confusing strategy of Google
With the end of Hangouts, Google turns the page on its chaotic strategy in this segment. The service debuted in 2013 with the idea of unify the company’s messaging services. Until then, the technology company had Talk, Messages, Messenger and Hangouts, as part of Google+.
The announcement of a new client with messages and video calls far from helping, confused users more. Later, Meet and Chat came as two separate products from the Workspace suite to empower communication.
Hangouts closure is due to a necessary change. Instead of upgrading to options like mentions, custom notifications, or something as basic as Dark Mode, Google cut to the chase and opted for Chat.
We have big ambitions for the future of Chat, and in the coming months, you’ll see even more features like direct calls, online threads in Spaces, and the ability to share and view multiple images.
Hangouts migration isn’t the only tweak to Google services. The Mountain View Company closed a few days ago Talk, the successor of GChat that we used more than 15 years ago to communicate with our Gmail contacts. Incredible as it may seem, the client was still available through third party applications such as Pidgin and Gajim.