On Monday, tech giant, Google announced that it is now set to completely shut down the chat app Hangouts later this year, and will be moving all current users of the platform to Google Chat. Users who are still using Hangouts on mobile will now see a prompt to move to either the standalone Chat app or the Chat experience in Gmail. “Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat,” the company declares in the notification.
Users Will Have One till Google Starts the Switch Itself
Furthermore, over on Gmail, Google won’t start urging Hangouts users to switch over until July. The Hangouts web client will remain available until November, and the company says users will have “at least” one month of notice before the platform’s webpage starts automatically redirecting to the Chat website instead. If you’re still actively using Hangouts, Google promises your chats will automatically transfer to its newer chat app. Users can also use the company’s Takeout service to download a copy of their data.
Moreover, Google has been slowly phasing out the Hangouts brand in favor of its newer messaging services for some time now, so it’s not surprising the company has finally chosen to shut down the platform. To attract users into making the switch to Chat, Google states that it’s launching a few new features, including the ability to make direct calls, create in-line threads in Spaces, as well as share and view multiple images.
Chat App Hangouts Was a Successor to GChat for Instant Message Service
Hangouts was launched back in 2013 and was the planned successor to GChat. GChat, or as some people know it, Google Talk, was shut down earlier this month, and after Hangouts suffers a similar fate later this year, it seems Google Chat will be Google’s latest attempt at presenting a seamlessly integrated instant messaging service across devices.
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