Google is about to let Hangouts die its famously long death, and the company is asking users not to look back as they meander along to Google Chat. It's the end of an era of sorts, namely the wasted time the tech giant spent trying to make an all-in-one dedicated calling and messaging app work within its vast suite of native apps.

Messages in the Google Hangouts web app show the message 'Your organization has upgraded to Chat. Starting November 1, 2022, Hangouts on the web will automatically be redirected to Chat on the web.' All messages and contacts should be automatically transferred to the new system, according to the company's message about the switch. Still, some messages won't transfer, and Google is telling users to export those conversations using Google Takeout or else lose all that data in 2023, when the platform will be truly broken. It has been a long and difficult road to get here. Google has said several times that Hangouts should be discontinued.

Still, this isn't a surprise. In 2021, the company opened its suite of Workspace apps to all users, including asking Hangouts users to switch to Chat. At some point, of course, the company had to stop asking its users to switch and instead mandate the change. Earlier this year, Google started encouraging users to switch to Chat. Since then, it has been forcibly migrating users to its other messaging app while stating that the cut-off date would be November 1, 2022. Chat would be much more similar to Slack in terms of functionality, although it currently lacks many of these apps. those popular features that make many of the popular platforms so useful. Sure, you can set your status or respond to others' messages with emojis, but Chat doesn't let you search documents like Slack Search does.

Google's other messaging app, Google Messages, explicitly tries to copy iMessages with features like voice message transcriptions – features that are exclusive to Android users. Apparently the only way to compete with a walled garden is to use even more walled gardens.

Hangouts started as a feature on poor, poor Google, first codenamed 'Babel', but became a standalone app in 2013, where the company started importing features from its previous line of messaging apps like Google Talk and Google Messenger. It integrated text messaging and Google Voice all into one app.

Despite Hangouts being installed 5 billion times on the Play Store, it seems the company's messaging strategy is cursed. In the years that followed, it seemed to reverse its idea of an all-in-one app and ask users to use Messenger for texting. later installed the ill-fated Allo and Duo apps on its Pixel smartphones. Guess which app wasn't pre-installed? If you guessed Hangouts, you were right. Worse still, Google has routinely been unable to compete with Apple's iMessage, meaning it regularly sues one of its biggest competitors in the app space to make cross-OS functionality easier for messaging. Earlier this year, Google Senior Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer begged Apple to adopt a Rich Communication Services standard that would hopefully put an end to the dreaded green box appearing on iMessage users, but so far Apple hasn't budged, even after the Android team launched an online campaign against its rival.

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