Google is officially ending one of its apps – MILLIONS will lose access this year

GOOGLE is shutting down another of its chat apps.

The US search giant confirmed yesterday that it would close Hangouts in November 2022.

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Launched nine years ago, the instant messaging service offers a platform for voice calls, video calls and text-based chat.

However, Google began migrating Hangouts to its newer apps Meet and Chat last year.

In February, the company began closing Hangouts to users of Workspace, its hub for professional software tools.

Google is now beginning to migrate free, personal Hangouts users to Chat.

“In October 2020, we announced that Google Chat would be available to everyone,” Google said in a blog entry.

“Since then, people have been able to continue using Hangouts or upgrade to Google Chat — available as a standalone 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 the remaining Hangouts users make the switch to Chat.”

The tech titan added that people using the Hangouts smartphone app will see a prompt to migrate to Chat.

Those using Hangouts in Gmail won’t see this message until July at the earliest.

Hangouts will be available on desktop by November, and Google said it will give users a month’s notice before moving the site to chat.

Most people’s conversations are automatically migrated from Hangouts to Chat, which means users don’t lose their messages.

Google encourages users who wish to keep a copy of their Hangouts data to download it using Google Takeout before the chat service shuts down.

You can do this by following these instructions.

It follows Google’s shutdown of another app, GChat, earlier this month. Hangouts was originally named as the successor to GChat.

To attract people to its newer service, Google said it’s adding a handful of features to chat.

This includes the ability to make direct calls, as well as share and view multiple images.

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