The end of Google Hangouts is a story we’ve been writing about for years. The timeline for it has shifted several times, but we might actually be getting closer, according to several updates Google shared this morning related to their formerly great messaging platform. We now know when the migration to Chat will happen, as well as the future of Hangouts with Google Fi and Voice.
Google Chat for everyone
The biggest bit of news that Google shared today involves Google Hangouts and Google Chat. As you likely know, Chat is the future of Hangouts and Google expects to begin opening up Google Chat to everyone in the first half of 2021. That’s a pretty broad time frame, but we are talking about messaging and an app (Hangouts) that has been in use for over 7 years.
Google will make Chat available for free to everyone (it’s currently exclusive to Workspace users), including the integrated experience within Gmail that Workspace users just picked up. Google will also migrate all of your conversations over to Chat from Hangouts, along with contacts and saved history. Once they finalize all of those specifics, they plan to share more.
To recap there, Google Chat will be available to you during the first half of next year, assuming you are still using Hangouts. Google will do a bunch of behind-the-scenes work to get you migrated over and ready to rock once that happens.
Google Hangouts death dates
Since that info above only talked about a vague “first half of 2021” time frame, I’ll add that the Google Workspace blog offered more important and precise dates.
In these two bullets, Google tells its Workspace customers that by Q2 of next year, they’ll have to opt-out of switching from Hangouts over to Google Chat, otherwise the switch will happen for them. Currently, it’s an opt-in change.
More importantly, the second bullet says that Hangouts for Workspace customers is actually, fully dying in “late 2021.” In other words, every single Google Workspace customer will have to be on Google Chat, as Google will fully replace Hangouts with it.
- Opt-out upgrade (no earlier than Q2 2021): All customers will be migrated to Chat Preferred unless their admins explicitly opt out. Customers who only have enabled Chat, with classic Hangouts completely disabled, will not be impacted.
- Mandatory upgrade (late 2021): All remaining customers will be migrated to Chat Preferred, and we will fully replace classic Hangouts with Chat. There will be no option to opt out at this stage.
Prepare yourselves.
Hangouts leaves Google Fi and Voice
On a couple of related notes, Google announced today that early next year, they will remove Google Fi support/integration from Hangouts. In the past, the two have played closely together, providing Fi users with SMS, phone call, and voicemail access within Hangouts. As Google has worked to improve Google Messages, that’s where they see the future. In fact, Google plans to allow Fi users to “make voice calls and check voicemail from Messages for web,” plus they’ll migrate Hangouts conversations over to Messages. In about a month, they’ll provide more details on how that will happen.
As for Google Voice, the big news here is that Google is going to further disconnect Voice from Hangouts. They’ll start pushing users who use Hangouts and Voice together over to Google Voice for everything they need.
So that’s it – Google Chat is finally opening up to everyone early next year, plus Google Fi and Voice are no longer friends with Hangouts.
Just installed Google Chats and it works for me as a replacement for hangouts.
It’s good to know about the replacement, happy to be able to continue using Chats as my go to messaging app.
It needs a dark mode though…
I really, really, really hate how locked down iPhones and iOS are, but Google seems to be hellbent in sending me over to them.
This is beyond BS.
Here goes Google again….HaHaHaHa. Imessage was released in 2011. It’s not 2020 and almost 2021 (in like 2.5 months). Google has squandered almost 10 years releasing messaging apps that are basically crap. In 10 years they haven’t figured out how to release a proper messaging app — 10 freaking years!!! Whatever they release next is basically another dumpster fire.
So true!!
We use Google Chat at my work in the school system. I can say I absolutely hate it. We used Hangouts previously until a few months ago. Chat didnt even have read receipts until a week ago, which is now just a chat head next to the message they read last. There is also a huge delay (10-20 minutes) from when the chat took place before it even pops up on my phone notifying me, in fact I could have already read and replied on the computer before it even tells me on my phone they sent a message. There are weird bugs like saying every new message was sent 3 minutes ago too. I dont know why they keep restarting chat/messaging apps but its beyond ridiculous.
Great, can’t wait to use Messaging for SMS, Chat for… chat, and Voice for uhh also basically SMS. Big improvement over being able to use Hangouts alone on my phone and desktop. Thanks Google.
Lol, I said this exact same thing on Android Police.
I miss having everything in Hangouts. It was easy.
There’s an important point omitted here, for Fi users at least. Messaging and call will work WITHOUT needing your phone to be on and connected. That’s an important upgrade for Google Messages – the lack of a true cloud backbone is the #1 reason I’m still on Hangouts.
Ok so when we switch to the new app we’ll find that half of the features that were in Hangouts are missing and then in a few years’ time the new Chat app will be discontinued right?
*laughs heartily in iMessage*
I am going to keep my Google Voice integrated into Hangouts as long as I can. I switched from Google Play Music to YouTube Music and regret it.
YouTube Music is a horrible dumpster fire.
Yeah google voice app is horrible, and I’m dreading switching to YT Music.
The one thing that’s missing is that Hangouts is cross platform. Apparently if I want to use Messages with Fi on my iPad, I’m going to have to use Messages for web in the browser, which is annoying.
Yeah, this is an important omission! It’s a real advantage of Hangouts and one of the reasons why I still use it.
TL;DR It will be abandoned.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
So Google Chat is going to be just another messaging app on the Play Store for anyone to use? So Google gave us Hangouts, then made us jump to Allo, then to RCS in Google Messages and now back to Chat (which is essentially Hangouts) again?
LOL… pretty much sums it up it seems. For me I never left or stopped using Hangouts for IMs to friends & family as I figured they’d pull this nonsense. And for txt msgs I haven’t used any of Google products/apps. Between 2 smartphones, 4 comps, and a Surface I wanted my stuff to stay in sync across all platforms for txting and have been using Pulse SMS for yrs now
Same here. I’ve been a happy Pulse SMS user for years. The best money I’ve spent in the Play store was for Nova, Pulse SMS and TiBU (when I was still rooting & romming).
Nova is by far, the best money I’ve spent in the Play Store, been using it for years – first was Swype (back in the day) now I use Google’s keyboard swipe function.
Best free app may be Google Voice for me. Been using it since day one. Best thing I did was sign up for about 6 GV accounts and now I have 6 customized phone numbers. All of them have the same last 4 numbers (the 4 letters of my last name) all in our home area code. Best part is I have been able to port out these GV numbers to my kids’ cell phones for $10 each. So now each one of my kids’ numbers ends in 6225, our last name. I have two more. One for my main GV account and one for the last kiddo when she gets her cell phone.
I also still have all the customized voice mails for my closest contacts… Glad GV is staying around.
Sorry, not sure how this post went on so long, but I guess I was just reminiscing about some of my favorite apps.
First we had GChat, then Hangouts, no one ever made you switch to Allo and no one really did. Same with RCS and Messages, no one made you switch and no one really did. Everyone I know kept just using Hangouts. Basically with everything they are doing it seems for the average user like it will just be a name change really, Hangouts to Chat.
*Google Talk was never called GChat officially.
You’re right, it’s been so long I forgot, lol.
Lots of people started using allo, because you didn’t, doesn’t mean other didn’t
Ok, worded it wrong then. Google “expected” us to switch…
Smh I’m so tired of this.