Enlarge (credit: Google)
It sounds like Google is finally getting ready to move on from Google Hangouts, the company’s most successful messaging app to date. A new blog post from the company is finally giving consumer Google Hangouts a shutdown date: November 2022. Today is also the day when existing Google Hangouts users will start getting nagged to switch to Google’s hot, new messaging app, Google Chat.
The shutdown of Hangouts has been a long time coming. The service launched in 2013 as an in-place upgrade to Google Talk. As Android’s default messaging service, Hangouts amassed 5 billion downloads, and at one point, it even handled Android SMS duties, just like Apple’s iMessage. The service fell out of favor with Google’s legendarily fickle messaging strategy in 2016 with the launch of Google Allo. Google announced in 2018 that Hangouts would eventually be shut down. After several delays, Workspace customers (the