Do you use Google Hangouts ? Well, you only have one year left to enjoy it. It seems the Mountain View-based company is determined to shut it down . We'll tell you everything we know about it.
A farewell that was coming
Google hasn't confirmed it yet, but all signs point to this being a death foretold. Sources very close to the company's internal product planning have confirmed to 9to5Google that the consumer Hangouts app will be discontinued sometime in 2020.
It's worth noting that Google stopped investing time in the app's development over a year ago, so this decision, which was already expected, won't have surprised many. Recent reviews of the app on the Play Store reveal numerous dissatisfied users due to the lack of updates and the persistent bugs and performance issues that are no longer being addressed.
The company led by Sundar Pichai is also quite prone to launching and shutting down projects of this kind frequently , so those of us who follow the company's trajectory and know its modus operandi aren't exactly shocked. The rest of the users are most likely very surprised by this sad closure.
Google's strategy involves focusing its efforts on two relatively new alternative solutions : Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet . The former is a direct response to the Slack communication platform, offering a team solution where everyone can chat in virtual rooms, supporting both group conversations and direct messaging. Hangouts Meet, on the other hand, is the company's video conferencing tool.
Both solutions described are integrated within G Suite , meaning you can join a Meet call directly from a Calendar event or an email invitation in your Gmail account. Similarly, Chat's support allows you to upload documents to Drive for sharing or to collaborate on edits in Docs and Sheets, to name just two examples.
It's worth noting that Google hasn't officially confirmed this , but it would be surprising if this information, coming from a reliable source, wasn't true. So, you'll have no choice but to prepare for the end of Hangouts. You have all of 2019 to come to terms with it and say goodbye.