Google Hangouts

In 2017, Google began developing two separate enterprise communication products: Google Meet and Google Chat,^[8] as a part of its Google Workspace office suite. Google began transitioning Workspace users from Hangouts to Meet and Chat in June 2020.^[9][10][11] Subsequently, Gmail users transitioned from Hangouts to Meet and Chat during 2021^[12] and the Hangouts service discontinued on November 1, 2022.

History[edit]

Prior to the launch of Hangouts, Google had maintained several similar, but technologically separate messaging services and platforms across its suite of products. These have included the enterprise-oriented Google Talk (based on XMPP), Google+ Messenger, and the Hangouts feature of Google+, which provided chat, voice, and videoconferencing features. However, its increasingly fragmented and non-unified suite of messaging offerings was also facing growing competition from services such as Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp. A decision was made to scrap the existing Google Talk system and code a new messaging product through a collaboration with multiple development teams.^[13]


Following reports that the new service would be known as "Babel", the service officially launched as Hangouts during the Google I/O conference on May 15, 2013.^[13][14]


On February 16, 2015, Google announced it would be discontinuing Google Talk and instructed users to migrate to the Hangouts app on the Chrome browser instead.^[15]


In January 2016, Google discouraged using Hangouts for SMS, recommending to instead use Google's "Messenger" SMS app^[16] (later renamed to "Messages").


In May 2016, at Google I/O 2016, Google announced two new apps: Google Allo, a messaging app with AI capabilities (AI-powered bots^[17] and selfie features^[18]) and Google Duo, a video calling app. Google's Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones released later that year were the first Google devices shipped with Duo and Allo preinstalled instead of Hangouts.^[19] Google has since confirmed that the new apps will not replace Hangouts; Hangouts will remain a separate product.^[20][21] In December 2018 Google announced Allo would be discontinued in March 2019 with some of its features migrated into Google Messages.^[22]


On August 15, 2016, Google announced that Hangouts on Air would be discontinued on September 12, 2016, and would be folded into YouTube Live, but later on September 11, 2016, Google said the Hangouts on Air shutdown date would be moved up from "September 12, 2016" to "August 1, 2019", to free all some livestreams on YouTube. Users will have to switch to other livestream programs.


On January 6, 2017, Google announced that the Google Hangouts API would shut down on April 25, 2017.^[23]


On March 9, 2017, Google announced that Hangouts would be targeted at business users with the Hangouts brand divided into two products: Hangouts Meet (now Google Meet) and Hangouts Chat (now Google Chat). Meet would focus on video conferences and Chat would be focused on instant messaging with additional features such as bot assistant and threaded messaging.^[24] The features would be targeted at business customers while consumer versions would use a freemium model.^[25] Google stated in December 2018 that "classic" Hangouts would be disabled by October 2019.^[26]


In November 2018, the desktop Chrome app version of Hangouts started displaying these banner messages at the top of its window: "The Hangouts Chrome app will be replaced by the Hangouts Chrome extension soon." This has generated many negative user reviews on the Chrome Web Store pages for both the Hangouts extension and the app.


In August 2019, Google announced that the G Suite version of Hangouts would be replaced by "Meet" and "Chat," and push the shut down to June 2020.^[27][28]


In April 2020, in response to COVID-19, Google Meet became free for all users,^[9][10]. Also in April 2020, Google announced Hangouts will remain a consumer-level product for people using standard Google accounts.^[29][30][31]


In October 2020, Google announced that Chat would also be made free to everyone and replace "classic" Hangouts by 2021.^[11]


In April 2021, Google Chat indeed became free as an "Early Access" service, for users who choose to use it instead of Hangouts.^[32]


On June 27, 2022, Google officially announced they would be shutting down Google Hangouts on November 1, 2022 and migrating all users to Google Chat.^[33]

Reception[edit]

In May 2013 Google Hangouts faced criticism from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as they felt that Google was "moving in the wrong direction" by shrinking its support for the open standard protocol XMPP.^[43] The new protocol made it much more difficult for multi-chat clients like Pidgin and Adium to support Google Hangouts, requiring reverse engineering the protocol. Additionally, the tight integration of Google Hangouts and Google+ could have lead to the unwilling sharing of personal information with others.^[44]


In November 2014, Make Use Of hailed Google Hangouts as the "best messaging app on Android by far".^[45]


In December 2015, Google Hangouts was given a score of 2 out of 7 on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Secure Messaging Scorecard, receiving points for having communications encrypted in transit and for having completed a recent independent security audit, but missing points for communications being encrypted with keys that the provider has access to, users not being able to verify contacts' identities, past messages not being secure if the encryption keys were stolen, the code not being open to independent review, and the security design not being properly documented.^[46][47]