Google’s strategy around its consumer messaging services remains puzzling, especially since it killed Allo (but kept Duo in life support). Today, the company clarified the timeline of the transition from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet for its G Suite paying customers. For them, the Hangouts retirement party will begin in October of this year.
For consumers, the situation remains unclear, but Google says there will be free versions of Chat and Meet that will be available “after the transition of G Suite customers.” As of now, there is no timeline, as far as we know, Hangouts will remain operational by 2020.
As for G Suite users, Google says it will start bringing more features from classic Hangouts to chat between April and September. These include integration with Gmail, the ability to talk to external users, enhanced video calls and making calls with Google Voice.
Google originally started migrating Hangouts users to the Meet video conference service last year. However, the story there was quite simple, since Meet was a new service with a new functionality. For Hangouts, the story is much more complicated, and Hangouts chat is not currently available to consumers. However, they have the possibility to choose from dozens of other messaging applications, and it is likely that all this confusion will cost Google many users.