It’s time to put an end to the suffering of Google Hangouts. The app has been in decline since 2016, when Google announced two new messaging apps: Allo and Duo. The end of Hangouts was set for 2017, and yet the application was reluctant to die. It’s time to say the last goodbye, after Google has removed Hangouts from Google Play.
Google Hangouts can’t download anymore from google play, neither by new nor by users who already had it. New users won’t even be able to see the app listing in the Google store. Rest in peace.
Goodbye Hangouts
Google has been making us dizzy with its messaging applications since the beginning of Android, and the icing on the matter is Hangouts. Hangouts was for many years the associated messaging application of Android, until sometime in 2016 his future began to falter after the umpteenth launch of Google messaging applications.
Hangouts has been in a coma for almost five years, and yet the application refuses to die. Google has tried everything to make us forget about Hangouts, from creating more and more similar applications to preparing transitions and including notices of its imminent closure, but the app was still working and was still available for download. Until now, already can’t download from google play.
The good news is that if you are part of the resistance, Hangouts still works if you have it installed or you install it from its APK, although in return you will receive a bunch of windows inviting you to switch to Google Chat in Gmail or to the independent Google Chat app. Also, Hangouts continues to work from its web version.
It is foreseeable that these warnings of the imminent closure later become the absolute closure of the applicationsimilar to other lengthy closures that Google has orchestrated, such as Google Play Music.
If you have it installed (or install it from the APK), it still works, but it’s full of warnings
Hangouts will always live in our hearts as Google’s commitment to the most serious messaging, and probably the only chance he had to fight the big guys like WhatsApp or iMessage. The history of Hangouts is long and very, very confusing, but as a final tribute here is a timeline of its most important events:
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2008: Google Talk launches alongside Android as the pre-installed messaging app.
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2011: Google Talk adds support for video calls in Android 2.3.4.
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2011: Google+ arrives, with its own messaging apps, Messenger and Hangouts.
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2012: Google cleans up and merges Google Talk, Messenger, and Hangouts (Google Talk for Windows continued to work until 2015).
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2013: Hangouts is postulated as the definitive messaging app by also adding SMS
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2014: Google begins to remove traces of Google+ from Hangouts: profiles no longer link to accounts on this social network. In addition, Hangouts integrates with Google Voice and the app is passed to Material Design.
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2014: Google launches Google Messages.
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2015: Hangouts begins to lose the SMS function, although it will not be completed until two years later.
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2016: Google launches Allo and Duo, but ensures that Allo does not replace, but coexists with Hangouts. Hangouts is no longer a pre-installed app on new versions of Android.
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2017: Hangouts is updated with news such as new emotes. Before the rumors, Google assures that Hangouts for consumers is not going to disappear.
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2018: Google launches two new messaging apps, initially for companies. Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. However, Google
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2018: Google gives up on Allo. Instead it prefers the RCS standard that will live in Google Messages.
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2020: Google thinks better of it and decides to make Google Chat free and also suitable for ordinary users.
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2021: Notices begin in the Hangouts app to invite users to use Google Chat.
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2022: Hangouts is removed from Google Play.
Via | 9to5Google
