You can download Hangouts history via Google Takeout until January 1

Abner Li | Sep 1 2022 - 2:47 pm PT

The only way to use classic Hangouts today is the website, but that’s set to go away in November. Ahead of that, Google is advising people to download Hangouts history via Takeout “because some of [their] conversations or portions of conversations won’t automatically migrate from Hangouts to Chat.”

The company mentioned that some people would be impacted back in June when Hangouts for Android and iOS stopped working, and users were pushed to the standalone Chat clients or the Gmail tab.

Google today sent out the “Important information about the upgrade from Google Hangouts to Google Chat” email but did not provide any more details on why it won’t be a complete migration for some people. It comes as hangouts.google.com is going away starting November 1. Whatever the reason, the solution is using Google Takeout.

Meanwhile, the company is now giving people until January 1, 2023 to download their conversation history. After that, “Hangouts data will be deleted” in a similar fashion to uploaded Google Play Music libraries.

Meanwhile, Google offers the following case for using Google Chat:

Why are users being upgraded?
Google Chat offers closer integration with other Google Workspace products and modern features like a gif picker and Spaces, a dedicated place for topic-based collaboration. In-product notifications about this change have been visible in Hangouts since last year and many users have already made the upgrade to Google Chat. For more information about the upgrade to Google Chat, please visit the Help Center.

Once this occurs and Google resolves the Duo icon situation with the Meet merger, the company’s long road to streamlining its communication services will be complete.

If you need help, be sure to check out our guide on downloading your Google Hangouts data.