Google Hangouts will shut down in November and it will start moving users to Google Chat

It looks like Google is finally getting ready to phase out Google Hangouts, the most successful messaging app to date. A new company blog post has finally given a Google Hanoguts closure date for consumers: November 2022. Today is also the day that existing Google Hangouts users will get annoyed to switch to the new popular Google messaging app, Google Chat.

Starting today, most Google Hangouts clients will start sending users to Google Chat. While most Google Hangouts add-ons lack comparable features, Google Chat is actually a worthy upgrade to Google Hangouts, so there are Google Chat options for all the Hangouts clients you may have used. On desktop, instead of Hangouts.google.com or the Hangouts for Chrome extension, there is https://chat.google.com/, which is also an installable Progressive Web App. Instead of the iOS and Android versions of Hangouts, you’ll be using Google Chat apps, which have better interfaces. As usual, there is a client built into Gmail.com and even a client built into the Gmail app, which can lead to an awkward situation when your chat messages arrive intwo applications.

Google says that all your Hangouts conversations that may date back to 2005 on Google Talk should be migrated to Google Chat. This data can also be downloaded via Google Takeout.

Google’s video apps are also in the midst of a big transition as Google Meet and Google Duo merge (with Google Meet being the surviving brand) in the works.