NEW DELHI: The tech giant Google announced in March 2017, that it will split the Google Hangouts into apps called Meet and Chat. Now the company has revealed the official timeline of the shutdown of its Hangouts app. With this new move Google aims to take on its competitors like Slack.
The company has announced that later this year it will start with the transition of classic Hangouts users in G Suite domains to Chat and Meet. This transition will be followed by the consumer transition which will begin in late 2020. The company also said that in between April and September 2019 the features from classic Hangouts will come to Chat and in October 2019 the company will start retiring classic Hangouts for G Suite customers.

In an official post the company said, "The above dates are specific to G Suite customers and their end users who use classic Hangouts. We will continue to support consumer use of classic Hangouts, and expect to transition consumers to free Chat and Meet following the transition of G Suite customers. A more specific timeline will be communicated at a later date."

The Chat will also become available to users on both web and via mobile apps. Users can also continue using classic Hangouts in Gmail, mobile, web or the Chrome extension.

The company also added that it will not start killing the Hangouts for regular users until the G Suite users are comfortable using Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. So, presently, the non- G Suite users don't have to worry about the change. Also the app is likely to die completely in 2020 which means users still have ample time with Google Hangouts.

Google Hangouts is not the only messaging app that the company has decided to kill. Last year, the company announced that it is shutting down its messaging app Google Allo. The company introduced the app in 2016 and will completely kill it by March this year.

Source: gadgetsnow.com