GOOGLE is shutting down another of its chat apps.
The U.S. search giant confirmed yesterday that it will close down Hangouts in November 2022.
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The instant messaging service launched nine years ago and provides a platform for voice calls, video calls, and text-based chat.
However, Google began transitioning from Hangouts to newer apps Meet and Chat last year.
In February, the company began closing down Hangouts for users of Workspace, its hub of professional software tools.
Google is now beginning the process of migrating free, personal Hangouts users to Chat.
“In October 2020, we announced Google Chat would be available for everyone,” Google said in a blog post.
“Since then, people could continue using Hangouts or upgrade to Google Chat – available as its own app or within Gmail – to take advantage of its modern features and integration with other Workspace products.
“We’ve continued to invest in Chat to help people better collaborate and express themselves, and now we’re taking steps to help remaining Hangouts users move to Chat.”
The tech titan added that people who use the Hangouts smartphone app will see a prompt to migrate to Chat.
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Those who use Hangouts on Gmail won’t see that message until July at the earliest.
Hangouts will be available on desktop until November and Google said it will notify users a month before it moves the site to Chat.
Most people’s conversations will be automatically migrated from Hangouts to Chat, meaning users won’t lose their messages.
Google is encouraging users who wish to keep a copy of their Hangouts data to use Google Takeout to download it before the chat service is shut down.
You can do that by following these instructions.
It follows Google’s shutdown of another app, GChat, earlier this month. Hangouts was originally tipped to be the successor to GChat.
Too woo people over to its newer service, Google said that it is adding a handful of features to Chat.
They include the ability to make direct calls as well as share and view multiple images.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
