Google Hangouts will likely be around for the foreseeable future, but the messaging service may get a rebrand in accordance with Google’s focus on its professional suite products.
Reports from 9to5Google suggested that the tech giant has plans to shut down Google Hangouts in 2020 but a Google employee quickly refuted the claim on Twitter. Scott Johnston, head of the Google Hangouts product team claimed that Google will integrate Google Hangouts users into its enterprise communication services Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, as opposed to scrapping Google Hangouts altogether.
Hey @hallstephenj, I run Hangouts and this is pretty shoddy reporting. No decisions made about when Hangouts will be shut down. Hangouts users will be upgraded to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Your source is severely misinformed. You can do better.
— Scott Johnston (@happyinwater) December 1, 2018
Hangouts Chat is an enterprise messaging service similar to Slack, while Hangouts Meet is an enterprise voice and video conferencing service similar to FaceTime.
Google Hangouts is a consumer-facing version of these services, which include messaging, voice conferencing, and video conferencing capabilities within one application. Hangouts was a go-to service for work communication, long before Google adopted a paid, enterprise model to its G-Suite services. However, Google stopped development on Hangouts in 2017, suggesting it was on end of life.
As per Johnston’s explanation, Google Hangouts users will soon have access to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. The consumer versions would likely have some user and memory caps and fewer features, in comparison to the enterprise versions, but it would put free users back on services that are actively being supported by Google. In accordance with the original report, Google Hangouts as a brand will be phased out, but its services will remain.
