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Google Hangouts For Consumers Will Be Shutting Down Sometime In 2020 (9to5google.com)
According to 9to5Google, Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020. The news shouldn't come as too much of a surprise since Google essentially stopped development on the app more than a year ago. Thankfully, there are plenty of other Google messaging apps available, such as Allo, Duo, and Android Messages. From the report: Last spring, Google announced its pivot for the Hangouts brand to enterprise use cases with Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, so the writing has been on the wall for quite some time regarding the Hangouts consumer app's demise. Meanwhile, Google has transitioned its consumer-facing messaging efforts to RCS 'Chat' and Android Messages following Allo's misadventures.
As mentioned, Hangouts as a brand will live on with G Suite's Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, the former intended to be a team communication app comparable to Slack, and the latter a video meetings platform. Meanwhile, Google Voice calling, which was at first independent and then long integrated into Hangouts, was moved back out to its own redesigned app earlier this year. Interestingly, despite its forthcoming axing, Hangouts was one of a few apps to get early support for Android Auto's new MMS and RCS functionality, alongside Android Messages and WhatsApp.
As mentioned, Hangouts as a brand will live on with G Suite's Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, the former intended to be a team communication app comparable to Slack, and the latter a video meetings platform. Meanwhile, Google Voice calling, which was at first independent and then long integrated into Hangouts, was moved back out to its own redesigned app earlier this year. Interestingly, despite its forthcoming axing, Hangouts was one of a few apps to get early support for Android Auto's new MMS and RCS functionality, alongside Android Messages and WhatsApp.
Google kills everything, so finally glad to see this. Bring back Reader
The only people who have been using Hangouts are spam bots who use it as a way of getting into people's gmail inboxes without actually sending an email. There's no easy opt-out either.
Hangouts is the only Google app that does VoIP. You can have a data only LTE phone and Hangouts together with Google Voice nuber makes it a fully functional phone that can send/receive calls and messages. Fully integrates with Apple's CallKit on iOS. I hear the integration is not as good on Andoid. Kind of ironic.
So what will be replacement. Hopefully they will have all the functionality ported to Voice app by then.
What has google created in the last... say, 10 years..?
Things that were amazing & cool, when they came out:
* Google Search
* Google Maps
* Gmail
The only thing that I can think of in addition... is... mayyyyybe "OK Google" ..?
Other than that, I keep hearing that they are making something, then taking it back. Making something, then taking it back. Making something, then taking it back.
I thought that Google Wave was interesting. Then that disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Everything else I am seeing is on the order of new mechanisms for advertising, or tiny incremental improvements to something, or "we improved it by destroying it, so it won't bother you any more."
Started February 2015, so obviously 5 years later it shuts down.
I guess data mining the video for their AI projects was harder than they thought.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I use it for people I communicate with regularly because it doesn't matter where I am...laptop, phone, tablet, etc. I can send and receive messages and it doesn't make a difference. SMS in a browser is pretty flaky still, and has a tendency to become detached at inconvenient times, and doesn't always send immediately.
I'm genuinely open to suggestions (I'm an android user, so no Apple only stuff) and Facebook messenger will be one of the last I consider.
Time to go back to skype I guess. Hangouts was the one app my family can use personally, and I can interact with in my corporate box. SO much for that convenience. Maybe I'll switch to something else.
...since the end of Windows Phone.
Google chat. thank goodness we can still use it! Oh....
First you shoved it down our throats. We liked gtalk. Then you abandon it.
And why as a business would we want to use it??? You stopped development on it over a year ago!!! Itâ(TM)s not good enough for the plebes, so now your paying customers have to use it!?!?
Asshats.
Same here; maybe Signal or Riot can get enough features by 2020 to be a decent replacement. The move to get the hell away from TIM silos as soon as possible is rapidly accelerating. Supposedly WebRTC is mostly usable now too; just needs a usability scaffold and directory.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Telegram.
I appreciate that search is paid for selling our search terms to advertisers. If it were a product we paid for instead, Google would chicken out and cancel it after the first sales month that wasn't a new high.
Remember how we used to hate it back in the nineteen hundreds when the US had only three TV networks, which had a habit of canceling any show that wasn't the national Neilsen leader by November? If Google had owned one of those networks back in the day, it would use the first dud show as an excuse to eliminate the whole concept of television - which its legal team could probably pull off.
We never really needed 20 chat platforms, just one that works well. Thus far, even Google chat worked, but there was nothing particularly special about it.
They need to release a chat platform that integrates with VOIP phones and such too.
Skype then...
Why can't somebody please come up with something like Pied Piper video chat that works better than Google but isn't Google and that Google can't sue into oblivion or buy it out and shut it down? Oh, right. I just answered my own question.
telegram still sucks, because it is based on phone number as an identifier
Agreed. I even still make use of the XMPP support via Pidgin on my desktop. Matrix (the protocol behind Riot which a sibling already mentioned) looks promising, but I haven't tried it out myself yet.
Riot.im honestly has more features than Hangouts at this point, when I go back to message people on Hangouts for instance I tend to find myself surprised I can't just attach arbitrary files for example.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I use Hangouts for pretty much all messaging. I rarely use my smartphone as a phone, and I don't really need data access, so only family members and a few close friends have my cell #. $15 of prepaid minutes usually lasts me a few months. So I won't use any messaging app/service that requires a cell carrier (or my cell #) for messaging.
Even if I did have unlimited texts, I still wouldn't want to give my cell # out to everyone. If all the good options for using my email address for messaging vanish, I may see if I can set up a Google Voice # for messaging only (no calls, and no SMS to my cell #). With Google looking like they want to ditch everything for RCS, that may be the way to go.
If you aren't willing to communicate with open protocols I can run on my own hardware, I don't really really want to talk to you anyway. XMPP, Matrix, good old email, and perhaps IRC. Randall will have to make a new Venn.
Not to mention all this but with Google Voice integration too.
I may see if I can set up a Google Voice # for messaging only (no calls, and no SMS to my cell #)
You can do this....and use the number with Hangouts for SMS messaging. Still no idea what the replacement for that will be when Hangouts is gone.
I've read that the replacement is supposed to be the new and improved Android messaging app:
https://gizmodo.com/how-the-ne...
Which of course may mean it's flaky from non-phone devices, but they're supposed to be switching to RCS as quickly as they can. Maybe RCS will be less flaky from a desktop/laptop than SMS. Not sure.
Woops. Sorry, the new RCS app will be called "Google Chat", not "Android Messages".
https://9to5google.com/2018/07...
Not sure when it will be available, though.
The problem is how long will we have the replacement... With Google it will be around for a couple years, and then they will drop it, and release something else. So don't get used to it or count it.
Google is famous for bringing out new ideas, scaling them, discovering they aren't profitable, ignoring them, and finally killing them.
Nextcloud has a video/desktop sharing addon called "talk". It isn't a complete replacement. There are others if all you want is text or screen or video camera sharing.
There's less and less reason to use any cloudy services that will disappear. You can self-host these things. For a small business, it really isn't too hard. Many people, like me, self-hosts at home.
If you miss google-reader, there are options.
Check out the "sovereign" project on github for lots of other projects that can be self-hosted to avoid the google-killed-my-app problem.
I starts to hurt. They launch products, kill every other initiative because they attract most of the early adaptors and kill the bandwith for everyone else. Then they kill the product entirely.
Whats left? Basically just Skype, maybe Zoom. Every other alternative lacks something.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.googlevoice
WeChat ?
Be sure to be monitored by Chinese gov.
But the app does a pretty good job.
To bad, I was trying to make my parents adopt HangOut, to replace poor quality phone communications. I'll need to train them again, on WeChat.
Getting sick of managing dozens of SMS/MMS/Chat/Voice/Video apps.
Totof
This is the reason you shouldn't even rely on one of the most powerful and rich companies on earth to provide a useful service over an extended period of time. I'm glad all my Google Accounts are throwaways.
Hangouts is a neat, feasible zero-fuss communications package and I use it regularly. Once it goes, I'll switch to threema ( https://threema.ch/en/ -- recommended ) entirely.
However, I'd like a neat web-centric video/VOIP chat solution, preferably one that doesn't get closed down 3 years in. Any suggestions?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
WhatsApp works fine for this, so does Skype
Android Messages doesn't have video chat. Google Allo does, but there is no desktop client.
Hangouts is great. Video, voice and text chat all in one place on mobile and desktop. Nothing else offers that.
Hangouts has some other unique features, like the way it handles group chats. It shows the webcam/avatar of whoever is talking using the volume level of each participant, and it really helps stop people talking over each other.
Damn it Google, why do you kill everything good? None of your other stuff comes close to Hangouts!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've always been of the opinion that grown-up men don't "hang out" - only teenagers do that. Hence I've never used, or proposed the use of, that awful thing that is Google Hangouts. Also, as one of the last entrenched BlackBerry OS users (yes, that's right: you'll have to pry that BlackBerry Passport from my cold, dead fingers), I was shielded from it anyways.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I've been using Hangout since the start, it's really a part of my life...
telegram still sucks, because it is based on phone number as an identifier
Same with Signal. I really dont get why people rave over Signal, the crypto might be great but the app is total shit, development is slow as mud and they still insist on every permission under the sun to work on your device for, reasons. Plus you have to upload your fucking contacts to them to find anyone. Just shitty all around.
I'm not against closed source apps but ones that claim to be privacy centric that remain closed are problematic to me.
What the hell does that mean? That the app will stop working, period, if you are just a consumer? That you will need some sort of contract with Google to get it work? And who/what is taking over its capabilities? The sorry Duo/Allo pair? Google Voice? No-one? Quite frankly, more and more it looks as though Google is run by very fickle, very stupid people that, outside the entrenched ad business that they have, are useless. Worse than useless, for they seem to have a knack for creating confusion apparently for no good reason. Probably Google managers striving to justify their (largely) unnecessary jobs. Larry, Sergey, are you having fun being mostly evil? And all for the sake of a few billions more, that you can't spend anyway?
The problem with Hangouts/Threema and many many other popular platforms, is that they are all centralized.
The centralization causes lockin, which when they get popular, inherently gives them power to do things that are not in users' best interests.
Here in Netherlands, Whatsapp is king. Now they plan to put ads in Whatsapp. "Whaa we should all move to Signal!".
Yeah, we should convince the entire country to shift the exact same power from this to that centralized solution, and hope it will be different this time?
So, I recommend something decentralized, like XMPP or Riot.
With those, just like email, you can choose your own client and server. You can choose to pay for it with either your money or your privacy. You can even choose to self-host with your own domain.
If your client/host starts doing things you dont like (such as shutting down or pushing ads), just give them the finger, get another, and you can still reach everybody.
If you want a concrete example of a good XMPP client+server/service, check out Conversations, or look at this list for other clients that have proper crypto (kinda similar to Whatsapp/Signal).
there are alternatives. I have been using various combinations of Tox, Signal, and others for a while now, but still fall back on Hangouts due to it's penetration. You knew you needed to take your communications back into your own hands at some point. This is just what everyone needs. We don't need to feed the hive mind anymore.
Try discord - that seems to be current app of choice.
First it was Google Talk, then it was killed and I went with Hangouts to avoid Facebook (minimizing attack surfaces...)
Now what? Allo?
Does it exist on smartphones *and* computers? Because it's way hard to type in those tiny slabs...