No Decision To Shutdown Hangouts, Says Google Representative

Just a few days back, a lot of technology websites reported that google had planned to shut down their messaging app- Hangouts. However, according to the Product Lead of G Suit, Hangouts will not be shut down. Well, it won’t exactly be shut down, but the company plans to migrate the users to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. The company representative also clarified a few more aspects using tweets. They said that while Hangouts classic will be shut down, it does not imply the end of support for messaging provided by the app.

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Google’s Future Plans

Google Hangouts is a communication platform that includes instant messaging, video chat and VOIP services. It is interesting to note that Hangouts itself was born from separate entities. These include Google Talk, Google+ Messenger (formerly: Huddle), and Hangouts, a video chat system present within Google+. The Google representative also commented that migration to Chat and Meet should be automatic. He also said that it should be invisible to the end user. Hangouts is not shutting down per se. But, it is going to disappear in a while, after all its users are successfully migrated. Google has previously also started and abandoned other apps and services such as Allo, Inbox and Reader.

Other companies are known to create a single app for instant messaging and video chat. They have then worked on it to improve it over the years, instead of shutting them down to create a new platform. We will have to see how the company handles the huge amounts of users that currently use Hangouts. Competition has been high from Facebook Messenger which is built on top of the most popular social media platform, Facebook. WhatApp also has a huge user base, owing to its first mover’s advantage in the messaging industry.