Google has announced that Hangouts is being replaced by Chat, in yet another restructuring of the company’s chat products. Earlier this year in February, Google killed of Hangouts for Workspace users and replaced it with Chat and now it is doing the same for free, personal Hangouts users.
Google has said that users who currently have the Hangouts app on iOS and Android will notice the app prompting them to move to the Chat app. However, for Hangouts users on the web, Google won’t be bugging them to move to Chat until July. Hangouts will fully be shut down in November however.
Google will be discontinuing Hangouts for good in November. As part of the process, existing chats should automatically move to Chat, but just in case Google is offering users to use Takeout which will allow you to download a local copy of you Hangouts data before Google deletes it.
