Google has announced the timeline of the transition from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet for its paying G Suite customers.
The tech giant said that Hangouts retirement will start in October 2019.
Chat will become available on the web for G Suite domains that have classic Hangouts enabled from April 2019. The next phase till September will see the transition of several Hangouts features to Chat. Later in October, Google will officially shut down Hangouts for G Suite users.
Google won’t kill Hangouts for other consumers, but it expects users to eventually adopt Chat and Meet. A proper timeline for Hangouts will be given later by Google. G Suite users can also continue using the classic Hangouts on Gmail, mobile, web or the Chrome extension.
Hangouts was launched as a replacement for Gchat in 2013 by the tech titan but has been losing features in recent years as the company has stopped updating the app and has taken away SMS messaging.
However, Hangouts still is a prominent chat option in Gmail on the web and the app also exists on the Google PlayStore.
Google Hangouts is a communication platform developed by the company which includes messaging, video chat, SMS and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) features.



Source: hindustantimes.com