Google Hangouts shutdown delayed

The company has extended its timeline for shutdown following the feedback from many users

Following the feedback from many users, Google has extended the deadline to shut down its Hangouts app. Later this year, it had informed that the company was going to close the app and that it would start transition of classic Hangouts users in G-Suite domains to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet — the former is a textbased communication tool for teams while the latter enables video meetings, again for enterprise users. This transition was to be followed by the consumer transition, which was scheduled to begin in late 2020. Google announced, back in March 2017, that it would redevelop Hangouts, its instant messaging client for various devices, to be more enterprise focussed.

“We're officially postponing the final transition date (i.e phase 4 in this timeline) to no sooner than June 2020,” said Google in a blogpost. Even though the date has been extended, Google says that it will be working to improve the transition experience of classic Hangouts group conversation, as well as add new chat features like read receipts. As of now, classic Hangouts users can only chat with Hangouts Chat users. It had added some features later this year, like enabling the users to delete a conversation history, which means that deletion will also be applicable between Classic Hangouts and Hangouts Chats in both directions.

Google does specify that G-Suite customers can transition their users immediately

if they like. The process has been detailed in the blog post. Many enterprises use Google's suite of services to provide email, communication, productivity and cloud storage tools to their employees and these changes will affect only these users starting June 2020. By the end of 2020 though, the company looks to move all G-Suite users to new services.