Google’s messaging-apps strategy is still as confusing as ever, but fans of the “classic” Hangouts service can breathe a quick sigh of relief today. Google says it’s keeping the old service alive for a little while longer.
Back in January, Google posted its plans to ditch the original Hangouts service starting this October. Now, the company is backing away from that plan—apparently after receiving “feedback from many of you that you’d like more time to migrate your organizations from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Chat.” Basically, Google doesn’t want to piss off its paying customers.
Instead, the company is “postponing the final transition date to no sooner than June 2020.” That means next June is the earliest you can expect to see Google finally kill off Hangouts, but it’s possible it’ll stick around for paying users beyond that date. Keeping with its earlier plan, Google says the belated change will hit “G Suite” customers first. Sometime after that, regular users will also be required to switch to Google’s replacements: Chat and Meet.
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