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Okay, now that we are all on the same page (right? Everyone?), The first news in the blog post is that Google Chat will be activated for consumer accounts “from the first half of 2021.” The service started out as a business-centric G Suite app (G Suite is now called “Google Workspace”), so access to Google chat originally required you to pay for G Suite. But in 2021 it will be free for everyone. Google says it wants a “smooth transition” from Google Hangouts to Chat, and “will automatically migrate your Hangouts conversations, along with saved contacts and history.”
The slow death of Hangouts
With the rise of Google Chat, Google Hangouts is going to die. Google initially announced this in 2018, and we are now getting more details on the slow service shutdown and transition plans for the services that depend on it. We’ve already seen Hangouts lose location sharing and SMS support, and in the blog post, Google announced that phone calls, Google Fi support, and Google Voice support will soon be removed from the service.
First, there is the loss of Google Fi SMS, which begins “in the next few weeks.” Google Fi can use your phone’s SMS app to send messages, but since it is a real cell phone service, you can also receive SMS messages through Hangouts. Hangouts has Android apps, a Chrome extension, and two web hotspots, Gmail and hangouts.google.com, so it was a very easy way to use Google Fi. For Google users, it was also home to their non-SMS messages, so they had everything in one convenient app. While Google Chat is taking over Hangouts, it is not picking up on this functionality. If you want to receive messages from Google Fi, you will soon need to use Google Messages, the Android SMS app.
Google Messages only has one Android app and one web app. The Messages Web app currently works by forwarding data from your phone, so your phone must be on for it to work, and you must log in by scanning a QR code from your phone. Google notes that Fi users will be able to use web messaging “even when their phone is off,” so it appears that normal login functionality will eventually make its way to the service.
Google Voice is also losing its Hangouts integration this month. Voice has its own phone apps and a web app, and you’ll need to use them soon.
The death of phone calls on Google Hangouts is apparently due to “new telecom regulations being introduced in the EU and US from 2021.” Google doesn’t explain what these new regulations are, but the timing lines up with a mandate from the FCC for VoIP services to include location with 911 calls by January 2021.
Google chat is not terrible
Ron Amadeo
All of this is very reminiscent of the other major Google shutdown that is happening right now: the transition from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. While YouTube Music is nowhere near ready and Google Music users can expect to lose a lot of features, Google Chat is pretty good as a replacement for Hangouts. For whatever reason, I already have access to it in my Google consumer account and have had the freedom to message my existing Hangouts contacts. There are no spectacular features missing, and the user interface is modern and simple. It is not ready yet, mainly due to transition issues. I cannot participate in group chats and I cannot add new contacts, only a certain number of my contacts have been marked as Chat compatible. The main messaging looks great though, and if both people are chatting, you’ll get great features like editing messages. It’s by no means a competitive service compared to messaging ecosystems that don’t restart every two years, but if you just want to send messages and images back and forth across all your devices, that’s fine.
However, as with Google Music, Google is backtracking again by shutting down an old service faster than it is building the new one. These transitions would be much smoother if Google made the new app fully functional first and then closed the old app after people have moved in. Slowly removing your existing apps without having a viable replacement ready doesn’t just feel bad; opens the door for users to abandon Google services entirely.
While Hangouts will lose more features this month, we don’t have a final shutdown date for the service yet.
