Google Shuts Hangouts Down. Here’s Why It’s a Good Thing

Source: Google

The Google Hangouts saga will soon come to an end—sometime in November 2022.

The search giant announced on its blog that it was finally transitioning existing users of Hangouts to Google Chat. The move will start today with mobile Hangouts users receiving a prompt to upgrade to Chat. Chrome extension users will be asked to use Chat on the web or install the Chat web app. As for people using Hangouts inside Gmail, the transition to Chat in Gmail will start in July.

To convince remaining users of Hangouts to move to Chat, Google has highlighted many of the additional features that come with Chat. These include seamless integration with Google Workspace and other popular Google apps like Docs, Slides, and Sheets. This will allow users to collaborate and do side-by-side editing of files while continuing the conversation in Chat.

Moreover, Chat is also accessible within Gmail and Spaces, the company’s dedicated place for topic-based collaboration both in real-time and asynchronously. And if you’re fond of using emojis and GIFs, Google says you won’t have any trouble finding that perfect emoji reaction in the Chat features.

As for conversations that reside in Hangouts, most users won’t need to worry about losing track of details or information contained in their messages. Google says most of the conversations will be migrated automatically to Chat. However, for people who would still like to keep copies of their Hangouts data, they can do so by downloading them using Google Takeout.

“We have big ambitions for the future of Chat, and over the coming months you’ll see even more features like direct calling, in-line threading in Spaces and the ability to share and view multiple images,” said the Product Manager for Google Chat, Ravi Kanneganti.

Using Chat Could Help Declutter the Digital Workspace

Hangouts’ exit from the competitive world of instant messaging apps is probably a welcome move for many Google users. That’s because Hangouts has been making people scratch their heads in confusion since 2016 when Google launched Google Allo—touted to be an instant messaging app with sophisticated security features. Allo was shut down in 2019.

Google launched new instant messaging apps since that time, including products like GChat (also known as Google Talk) and Google Meet. If you’re one of those people who went online to get to the bottom of the mystery of whether Hangouts and Meet or Chat are the same, well, we have our answer.

With the focus directed to Chat (and with one less chat app to worry about justifying its existence), Google now has a better chance of delivering more useful features to its instant messaging app instead of confusing users. The competition is stiff though with players such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Telegram. Even Zoom, which originally exploded as a video conferencing app, has instant messaging. Instant messaging apps have become a staple in remote work tools and will most likely continue to be as more businesses embrace work-from-home or hybrid work setups.

All the newly-added features and deep integration with Google Workspace also build the case for Chat, especially for business users. There’s already an overwhelming number of enterprise apps that are flooding the professional lives of knowledge workers, so being able to get powerful collaboration tools in one place and from the same vendor would actually be a great help in decluttering a company’s tech stack.