Google finally shuts down instant messaging platform, Hangouts after 9 years
Google has announced its instant messaging platform, Hangouts has been retired giving way to a similar and more improved messaging app, Google Chats.
Earlier this year, Google announced it will be shutting down Hangouts to give way to a slack-like instant messaging platform, Google chats which is designed for businesses.
Hangouts, a cross-platform instant messaging service was designed as a text, video and voice chat app in May 2013. It was a Google+ feature which was accessible by Gmail users who preferred getting an instant reply instead of using the mail route.
It later became a standalone product in 2013 and had features from Google+ messenger and google talk integrated into it. Hangouts was finally retired on November 1, 2022 since it was created 9 years years ago and had amassed about five billion downloads on playstore.
The move to retire Hangouts started earlier this year when Google retired the service on its Android and iOS platforms in July this year. The last of the services, the web product has been recently retired which marks the end of the product’s use across all electronic platforms.
The slow retirement of Hangouts, however, did not come as a surprise to many users as Google had already warned users and had also given some the opportunity to migrate to the new service – Chat in 2021.
Users were advised to use another of Google product, Google Takeout to download and save a copy of their data on Hangouts. It was also important to note that while transferring data from hangouts, the transfer of messages and contacts will be automatic but not all of the data will migrate to Google Chat.
Users have until January 2023 to keep their Hangouts data.