Google Hangouts: Chat and Meet to replace messaging service soon

for several years, hangouts in its classic version, it is no longer among Google’s priorities. The arrival of the Google Allo app initially suggested that Hangouts would be abandoned. However, the once very popular app is still accessible to loyal users. That said, Google’s strategy with its messaging apps remains pretty confusing.

The firm has at least seven applications in this category and now it looks like they want to streamline things. Google has already announced that Allo is abandoned as of March 2019. We now learn that the end of Hangouts is scheduled for October 2019. At least, the first stage of its abandonment.

Google Hangouts: Google is preparing its final abandonment

Already since 2016, smartphone manufacturers no longer had to offer Hangouts between Google Apps, which is by default on all Android smartphones. Google even decided to remove SMS support from Hangouts in May 2017. However, the most popular Google messaging app of all time (over a billion downloads on the Play Store) still has a strong following.

In a blog post dressThe Mountain View company announced on its roadmap that from October 2019, Google will begin pulling back “classic” Hangouts to users of its suite of paid apps (G Suite). Google will withdraw the classic version of Hangouts options available to G Suite customers. Second, Hangouts will be invited to use Chat and Meet. Note that Hangouts Chat is a separate app from the original Hangouts.

” As we announced in 2017, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet are the next generation of Hangouts that emphasize team communication. Later this year, regular Hangouts users in G Suite domains will switch to ChatReads Google’s post.

This is the first step, waiting for other users to migrate to Chat and Meet, which should happen later. Google hasn’t announced a date yet, but our colleagues from The Verge are talking about 2020.