Starting today, people who still use Hangouts will see an in-app prompt suggesting them to move to the chat app or use Chat in Gmail. The Hangouts app will be shutting down in November. People who still use Hangouts in Gmail on the web will be automatically upgraded to Chat in Gmail.
Google also confirms that hangouts conversations will automatically migrate to Chat for most people. Still, users should download a copy of their data from Google Takeout from Hangouts goes away.
Google chat offers a lot of things like users can edit Docs, Slides, or Sheets with side-by-side editing. So, that is also a collaboration tool. It also includes Spaces and can be used alongside Gmail, Spaces, and Meet.
Google is also rolling out some new features to Chat. These features include the ability to make direct calls, create in-line threads in Spaces, and share & view multiple images.
Back in October 2020, Google confirmed that it would let users move to chats from Hangouts for free. Chat was originally launched to take on Slack but was later released for all consumers.
