Late last week, it was reported that Google will be shutting down Hangouts by 2020. 9to5Google reported this citing sources familiar with the product’s internal roadmap. However, Google Real Time Communications product lead Scott Johnston responded to the report, tweeting that Google is yet to make a decision about when Hangouts will be shut down and that the information in the report was misleading. So while Hangouts will most definitely meet its end, the exact time is yet to be confirmed.
Johnston in a series of tweets explained that 9to5Google’s reporting offered “dramatic conclusions” and that it is only “half the story.” While Johnston agrees that Hangouts for consumers will end eventually as Google has already stopped development on the app more than a year ago, he adds that this does not imply that Google will end support for messaging and meetings.
Google plans to migrate legacy Hangouts users to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. These are enterprise-focused products that Google announced last year as redesigned versions of Hangouts. Google’s move to stop development of Hangouts for consumers was largely because of Allo and Duo, which are the company’s alternative messaging and video calling apps.
But Google is still trying to sort through its various messaging apps. The company retired Google Talk a while ago. Earlier this year the company announced that it would pause development of Allo as it wanted to dedicate all its resources to Rich Communication Services that would be branded as Chat in yet another attempt to launch a successful messaging app.
As Chats and Meets are for enterprise consumers with G Suite accounts, it will be interesting to see how Google plans to migrate regular Hangouts users to these services. Hangouts has been losing consumers steadily over the past few years as they have migrated to other, more popular messaging platforms. Hangouts is now mostly used in Gmail for web and the app still exists on the Google Play Store.
