Hangouts migration to Google Chat actually happening, sort of

Google Talk/Hangouts/Chat
1

I was just thinking the other day that the latest Hangouts deadline of the “first half of 2021” (not to be confused with 2019 or 2020) was about to end with nothing happening, but this appeared in Hangouts for me this evening:
image

Hangouts is being replaced by Google Chat

Your conversations from the last year are already in Chat, and older conversations will be available later.

The Learn more link takes you to Learn about the switch from Google Hangouts to Google Chat - Google Chat Help, which has the following info:

Google Chat limitations

  • Video call ringing isn’t available on Google Chat. If you use classic Hangouts for direct video calls that ring, don’t switch to Google Chat. To start a video call in Google Chat, you can drop a Google Meet chip into the conversation and dial in.

  • Classic Hangouts message history after June 2020 appears in Google Chat. Message history from before June 2020 will be available in Google Chat later.

  • Children under 13, or the applicable age in their country/region:

    • Don’t have access to Google Chat yet. They can continue to use classic Hangouts.
    • Can’t send messages from classic Hangouts to Google Chat.
    • If you have active conversations with accounts for children, don’t switch to Google Chat.

  • Google Chat supports blocking people across all Google.com services. If you previously blocked people in classic Hangouts through a third-party product (such as an XMPP client), these block settings won’t carry over to Google Chat. Review your list of blocked people.

So it doesn’t look like it’ll be a forced migration/shutdown until some of these limitations are addressed.

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2

And this showed up in the past few days when trying to open the Chrome app:

It pops Chrome open and forces you to click ‘Open anyway’ every time.

Well, I can’t say they didn’t warn me.

3

My stupid face thought that hangouts would migrate to Google Talk

4

I’d say there’s a non-zero chance of them circling back to Google Talk.

After all, they started there, then did Hangouts, then made Allo and Duo (both as separate things), then a year later they push out Meet and Chat (again, more separate things), then a year later they killed off Allo, then they announce that Duo will become Meet, then a year later they say it won’t be, suddenly the next year they pull the reverse card and merge those after all, and then last month they changed the Meet icon back the Duo icon because no one knew what it was.

None of that whole adventure even includes the Hangouts to Chat transition which has been going on four years, and the final Google Talk shutdown which was just a few months ago.

At the current rate of new messaging/chat/meeting apps/services they produce, they’ll run out of names in English (arguably I suppose they already have since ‘Allo’ is French) and have to switch back to Talk.

5

hangouts was better to say the least

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