Kanneganti sought to reassure Hangouts die-hards that the company has been making efforts to upgrade and improve Google Chat to cater to all. Web users will see a notice at least a month before Hangouts on the web begins redirecting users to Chat. People who use the Hangouts Chrome extension will be asked to move to Chat on the web or install the Chat web app. Those who use Hangouts in Gmail on the web will be converted to Chat in Gmail. Until then, people who use the feature on mobile will begin to see an in-app prompt asking them to move to the Chat app or the Chat tool in Gmail. Google will pull the plug on Hangouts in November. “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,” he added.

In a blogpost published yesterday (27 June), Google Chat product manager Ravi Kanneganti said that people who still use Hangouts will now need to “upgrade” to Chat, with its “modern features and integration with other Workspace products”. At the time, users could switch to Chat or continue using the Hangouts messaging platform. Google Chat is a communications tool that was initially designed for teams and businesses, but was made available for all users in 2020.

Google is beginning to phase out Google Hangouts for users and encouraging them to migrate to Google Chat. Users who want to keep a copy of their Hangouts data are encouraged to use Google Takeout to download this data before the service is shut in November.

Hangouts app on mac change user