Google Hangouts Hung Up and Out
November 15, 2022
We have been hearing for years that Google Hangouts was being shuttered. Maybe. Sort of. Now Engadget reports, “Google Hangouts Is Well and Truly Dead.” Writer Mariella Moon tells us:
“Google has laid Hangouts to rest, a couple of years after it first announced that it was going to push people to use Chat, its Slack-like app, instead. After allowing users to move to Chat on their own in 2021, Google phased out the Hangouts Chat app for Android and iOS in July. Users were shown a prompt telling them that ‘Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat’ and to switch to either the standalone Chat app or the Chat experience within Gmail. As TechCrunch notes, the last version of the messaging service, Hangouts for the web, is now also going away for good. When users access the Hangouts website, they might see a message that says: ‘Starting November 1, 2022, Hangouts on the web will redirect to Chat on Web. We recommend moving to Chat now.’ We can still access the website without being automatically redirected, but there’s a link to Google Chat that we can click to load the new messaging experience. The website might completely disappear in the coming days.”
Google Chat boasts collaboration features that Hangouts lacks, and it was a paid offering when Google first planned the shift. Chat is now a free tool that integrates with Gmail. For any users who have not yet saved their Hangouts data, there may still be time to do so with Google’s Takeout tool.
Cynthia Murrell, November 14, 2022
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
