Google messaging ecosystem is a mess. The company maintains too many products that do similar things.
Not only that it confuses users, but the redundancies and the lack of cross-compatibilities make them not worth the effort of even having. In the world dominated by the likes of WhatsApp, Google is finally killing Google Hangouts, in favor of Google Chat.
To show that it's being serious this time, Google is officially urging the remaining Hangout users to switch to Chat.
In a blog post, Google said that:
To entice users into moving to Chat, Google is suggesting that Chat is better in many ways if compared to Hangouts.
"Google Chat also includes Spaces, a dedicated place for topic-based collaboration. Groups and teams can share ideas, work on documents, and manage files and tasks, all from a single location. And, the new integrated view in Gmail makes it easier to use Chat alongside your Gmail inbox, Spaces, and Meet."
Google plans to finally kill Google Hangouts in November.
To ensure that things would turn out smoothly, users of Hangouts will see an in-app screen urging them to move to Chat in Gmail or the separate Chat app.
If users use Chrome, they will too see the prompt encouraging them to accept the inevitability.
Google Chat’s remodeling is primarily a byproduct of the company’s shift to Workspaces.
As Google explicitly states in its blog, it has “big ambitions for the future of Chat.”
And that future is certain.
The good thing is that, the transition over to Google Chat should be seamless.
"For most people, conversations are automatically migrated from Hangouts to Chat, so it’s easy to pick up where you left off. However, we encourage users who wish to keep a copy of their Hangouts data to use Google Takeout to download their data before Hangouts is no longer available in November 2022," Google said.
As for projects and the prospects of Google Chat, the company said that it has "big ambitions."
" [...] over the coming months you'll see even more features like direct calling, in-line threading in Spaces and the ability to share and view multiple images. As we take this final step to bring remaining Hangouts users to Chat, we hope users will appreciate our continued investment in making Chat a powerful place to create and collaborate," Google explained