The Google Hangouts instant messaging platform will begin to disappear next month when it will become replaced by Google Chat.
Google Chat is the messaging platform of the Google Workspace suite
This would complete the upgrade of Google Workspace, the evolution from “Gmail+Google Docs+Meet” to its previous phase GSuite, now consisting of the sum of its productivity and instant communication tools.
It will be from March 22nd when Hangouts will be completely replaced by Google Chat, so that users accessing the Hangouts website or activating the application will be routed directly to Google Chat.
This new development completes one more phase in the already long and not always successful path traveled by Google in the effort to offer a messaging platform that would have at least a part of the success of another of its tools, such as the popular email Gmail.
Hangouts conversations that have been maintained up to the time of the upgrade/migration/evolution/integration will not disappear but will remain accessible in Google Chat. However, Google warns that this general rule could have exceptions in some very particular cases, although it has not specified which ones.
The migration from Hangouts to Google Chat was announced as early as June 2020, emphasizing its integration with Gmail so that chat becomes a complementary function to email management. See not to confuse Google Chat with GChat, the unofficial name for Google Talk, Google’s chat platform that disappeared in 2017 to be replaced by Hangouts.
Finally, at first this change from Hangouts to Google Chat will affect only Workspace users in addition to G Suite Basic users and Business version users, which is as much as to say users who make use of these tools as part of the management of the company or organization for which they work and who have a professional account. In a second and later phase, as has happened in previous occasions, these changes will be applied to the rest of the users of a Google account.
