Google Hangouts is going to be Upgraded and become Chat in November 2022

Google Hangouts is going to be Upgraded and become Chat in November 2022

Google Hangouts’ formal end of life has been announced, giving users just a few months to get ready for the major transition. As part of its effort to modernize its Google Workspace suite and make it as useful as possible for customers, the firm has disclosed that Hangouts will now be discontinued for all users by November 2022. Google is now focusing on the remaining mobile users, who will start to notice alerts about needing to switch to Google Chat over the next few weeks. Google is already in the process of migrating many desktop and browser users over.

Upgrade Google Hangouts to Chat

When Google made the latter service available to all users for free in October 2020, information about a switch from Hangouts to Chat was first made public. Enterprise and commercial users on “Classic Hangouts” will be updated to Google Chat in March 2022, thus some users have already made the transfer. Users of the Chrome extension for Hangouts will also be prompted to switch to Chat on the web or download the Chat web app. In July, users who continue to use Hangouts in Gmail on the web will be upgraded to Chat.

A month or more before Hangouts on the Web starts redirecting to Chat on the Web, users will see an in-product notice, according to Google. Hangouts on the Web will also continue to function until later this year. However, the firm advises users who wish to save a backup of their Hangouts data to download it using its Google Takeout service before Hangouts is discontinued in November 2022. The company claims that conversations are automatically moved from Hangouts to Chat.