Goodbye Google Hangouts: the messaging app of Google will close at November 2022. After suspending the service for users of the Google Workspace who used it as a work chat, from today the conversations on smartphones will migrate to the Chat app. And soon the release from Gmail too. Another ‘fallen’ among the Mountain View projects.
Google Hangouts closes in November, yet another closed project
Hangouts is the messaging app that Google has developed since 2013. He wanted to be Mountain View’s answer to Apple’s WhatsApp and iMessage, but not only that. Google had developed this service to be pervasive: it could be used on smartphonein the web version of Gmailsul social Google+. In short, a multi-platform messaging that perhaps arrived before the need was felt. An ambitious project, which however has never completely taken off.
The ambition of Google’s engineers means that it will now take even longer to shut down the service. In fact if in February it has deleted Hangouts from Google Workspacethe migration of chat mobile su Chat (not to be confused with GChat, which Google shut down last month).
Users who use Hangouts on the web app on Gmail instead they won’t see any changes until at least July, according to reports from Google. And on the desktop site, you can continue using Hangouts until November, albeit one month before Google will begin notifying users to switch to Chat.
The move to Chat, the new (yet another) messaging app from Google
Google started thinking about shutting down Hangouts as early as 2018, the year after the app’s two replacements were launched: Meet e Chat. But if the first has quickly achieved great popularity, also thanks to the forced remote work that many have experienced in these two years, Chat does not have the same appeal.
To sweeten the pill for Hangouts users who switch to Google Chat, the company has made the switch automatic, as well as allowing you to download a backup of conversations via Google Takeout. But it also released some news. Like the ability to do direct callscreate virtual rooms within threads and the ability to show and share multiple images at a time.
But many critics already suspect that Hangouts won’t be the last messaging app to join the Google cemetery, where the Mountain View projects that do not take off end. If with Gmail Google immediately caught the right recipe, offering a service used by many people, it doesn’t work as well with messaging apps.
Before Chatwe have seen Google Talk, Google Plus Huddle, Google Hangouts, Google Allo and a million chats integrated into other services. Also with regards to video calls along with Meet the less popular coexists Duo. And what about smartphone messages, if now Messages is catching on partly because many smartphone manufacturers have stopped developing special apps: users no longer use messages, preferring WhatsApp and Telegram.
So let’s say goodbye to Hangouts, like others before him. And let’s cross our fingers for Chat: will it be the right time? Or just a new experiment from Google? Tell us what you think in the comments.