I still use Hangouts daily, and while I'm sure that puts me in the minority, I doubt that I'm alone. But it was far from a failure, and sometimes I reflect on what Hangouts could have been if Google had redirected all the effort that went into Allo to iron out its issues. There's no getting around the fact that, even at the best of times, Hangouts was often a buggy and frustrating experience - if not an outright dumpster fire. Looking back across the last decade, it's easy to remember all the things Hangouts did right while glossing over its failings. A mere few months remain by that timeline as we all prepare to make the trip, which could happen any day now. Google has been explicit that the transition to Chat would happen officially sometime in the first half of 2021, with all our chat history, contacts, and conversations moving over. The company would spend the next two years transitioning and merging Hangouts bit by bit behind the scenes to its spun-off successor, as Allo was also finally killed when it failed to take off. Remember that explicitly business-oriented Hangouts Chat service Google spun off? Turns out, that's where the consumer Hangouts would be going. On life support, Hangouts went months without bug fixes and lost features when it did get updated.ĭetails regarding the transition took years to trickle out, and Google went against its own claims more than once. One handled video conferencing, the other was a Slack-like service.įinally, SMS support in Hangouts was outright killed. Google Voice began disentangling itself from the Hangouts amalgamation in 2018 as Hangouts Chat debuted, and by the end of the year, Hangouts was rumored to be on the chopping block. In 2017, as Hangouts languished in Google's forgotten pile of services, the company finally split Hangouts up, introducing new Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat services meant for business.
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