It’s no secret that Google has a serious problem with messaging apps. In the company, they are addicted to creating these types of services, with several internal teams competing with each other. As a result, the situation was often chaotic, with many different apps doing the same thing, but unable to communicate with each other.
[Enviar varias imágenes por Google Chat por fin es posible, ya no tiene que ser una por una]
Hangouts was born to change that, as Google’s main messaging app. In the end, it turned out to be another project announced as the best and abandoned after a few years for a different alternative, and today its demise ends.
Google Hangouts closes completely
Of all Google’s messaging apps, Hangouts was perhaps the most well-received by users; This did not prevent its death and its replacement by another application, in this case Google Chat, which was born as an application for professionals and companies. After a while of the two services coexisting, Google is finally ready to turn off Hangouts life support.
The Hangouts website
The free Android
You might not know this because the Hangouts app for Android has long since been discontinued, but in reality, the service was still accessible from hangouts.google.com. In fact, at the time of this writing, the website is still running, but it’s expected to end this week.
Google has confirmed that this remaining method of using Hangouts will be removed, and as of now, the page will be redirected to chat.google.com, the web-based version of Google Chat. Users attempting to join Hangouts will be redirected to Chat automatically and with no option to switch back to the old app. And if we try to download the Hangouts application for Android, we will find a screen that tells us that we must open Google Chat, either in Gmail or in the independent application.
Google Hangouts has been the default messaging app for years
Obviously, this website didn’t offer the same experience as the app, but those who refused to switch to Google Chat still used Hangouts that way; and they were not few. Although Google Chat has improved a lot, Hangouts was highly regarded and set the foundation for what we expect from a messaging app today; At least Chat was built on that instead of from scratch, so Chat and Hangouts users could talk as if they were using the same app.
So the consolation we should take from this loss is that Google seems to have left behind those crazy days of launching a messaging app every month, and is more willing to improve chat instead of creating a new application with the new features that want to introduce. Knock on wood to say that this is the last shutdown we have had to endure for a long time.
