Google Hangouts to officially be decommissioned starting October this year

Google Hangouts happened to be the Mountain View giant’s foray into the world of instant messaging and while the company marketed it as a competitor to WhatsApp or Messenger, it has been quite clear that Hangouts has lacked woefully behind. It never really did catch any steam and now Google has officially made the decision to move the features of the main Hangouts app to two other subsidiary apps which are Hangouts Chat and Hangout Meet.

It won’t be right to say that Hangouts was a failure. It had over a billion downloads on Android while it also served as the primary chat portal for the 1.5 billion Gmail users. However, the 13-year old app, which had initially started as Google Talk, will start shutting down from October 2019.

In a blog post , Google has detailed that its Gsuite customers will be the first to see the app go in October while the regular customers will have until sometime in 2020. In any case, those of you who are fond of Hangouts need not worry. Google has said that it will be migrating most of the important features from the Hangouts app into Hangouts Chat , which is an app that has many Slack-like enterprise features. Hangouts Meet is more of a video-conferencing app, much like Skype.

As of right now to avoid any confusion, Google has renamed Hangouts to Hangouts Classic. In due time, Hangouts Classic and Google Allo will be removed from the roster but it would still leave five messaging apps under Google.