Google Hangouts

The branding around Hangouts — in 2020, that means Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet — is a mess. Those two brands are derivatives of a pre-existing brand that never made much sense in the first place. In today’s suddenly-video-conferencing-centric world, Google needs to simplify things, and a new support page update suggests that change is finally coming.

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Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many are using video conferencing to work and learn remotely. For Google, its Meet service is seeing the brunt of use by enterprise and education customers. Classic Hangouts was updated on iOS today with a warning that video quality might be reduced.

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Classic Hangouts is on its way out, though the mandatory transition for G Suite users was delayed to later this year. An update to Hangouts for Android today sees Google remove the ability to share your location.

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Late last year, we broke the news that classic Hangouts was set to be deprecated and replaced by Hangouts Chat and Meet. Google confirmed the news and later provided an October 2019 deadline. Today, the company announced that it’s delaying the transition and eventual death of Hangouts to June 2020.

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Google Hangouts wasn’t critically acclaimed in the way it probably should have been, and as Google’s messaging mess continues, the service is scheduled to eventually split into other products. Hangouts as we know it is on its death bed, but apparently, that isn’t stopping Google from rolling out a new user reporting feature.

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After classic Hangouts is retired for G Suite customers later this year, consumer accounts will also be transitioned to Hangouts Chat and Meet. One casualty of this shutdown is Hangouts On Air, which is “going away later this year.”

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Starting in April, Google will begin winding down Hangouts classic for G Suite and eventually regular users. The latter transition is not set to begin until later this year, with Google working on porting over features to Hangouts Chat. In the meantime, Hangouts for Android was just updated with support for Oreo’s notification channels.

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Alongside initial details on the transition of G Suite users from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Chat & Meet, Google is also giving us just a little bit more info on the transition from ‘classic’ Hangouts to free Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for consumers.

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With all the buzz recently around (the recently dubbed) “Hangouts classic” shutting down, in favor of Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, we took some time as a group to give Hangouts Chat a hands-on trial. Needless to say, things didn’t go smoothly.

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Over the past week, the narrative around Google’s messaging and communication services has been defined by a spate of planned deprecations — both of which 9to5Google first reported about. While older services will be “sunset,” the company’s vision for consumers hasn’t changed much since earlier this year, revolving around RCS “Chat” and Google Duo video calling.

However, complicating this dual-service future now is the newly-revealed fact that the enterprise-focused Hangouts Chat and Meet will also be available to consumers, and that Google Voice is still an active service. This is just the latest in Google’s tangled and sometimes incoherent strategy for simply saying “Hello.”

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Over the past several days, 9to5Google reported that Google was planning to move away from “classic Hangouts” and sunset Google Allo. Amid the discussion about the company’s messaging future, Google today clarified its strategy, and published a definite blog post confirming our two reports.

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According to source familiar with the product’s internal roadmap, Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020. That’s not surprising at all since Google essentially ceased development on the app more than a year ago. But just know, going into 2019, this is indeed your last year to keep using the beloved (?) legacy chat app.

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While many in the Android and Google-fan communities used and loved (well, sometimes loved) Hangouts for messaging others from mobile and desktop, Google is now shifting the app’s focus to enterprise. In its place is Allo, which only started working on the web this week. Although we can’t help you get Hangouts back, we can help you make Allo look similar to the Hangouts web client…

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Google announced last week that it intends to deprecate SMS functionality in Hangouts, and now an update is rolling out which prepares users of the messaging platform to switch SMS apps. Hangouts 18 doesn’t seem to have any functional changes, but it does add the necessary components to help educate users on the forthcoming transition…

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We heard just yesterday that Google is planning to remove SMS capabilities from Hangouts, and now Google has detailed this change — as well as others — in a new post on its G Suite blog. The changes are part of a larger effort to “streamline” Hangouts and Gmail as G Suite offerings…

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Earlier this month, Google finally announced its rebranded Hangouts Chat focussed on the enterprise. With the company also showing renewed focus on Android Messages as the platform’s defacto RCS client, it makes sense for Hangouts to eventually lose its SMS capabilities. In an email reportedly sent to G Suite administrators, that change will take place in May.

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