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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.
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.
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.
Yeah--or simply voice calling from your desktop. I guess a feature I've used for the better part of a decade is going away.
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.
Personally, the main area of growth I've seen is that I rarely have to pick up my phone and use the keypad or, much of the time, even look at the screen anymore. I can and do accomplish almost everything conversationally. I set appointments, add things to lists, have lists read to me, send messages, perform all my navigation, make all calls, play music, start and stop my runs, set timers and query timers and alarms, set reminders both at times and locations, etc. conversationally. And I never have to worry whether the people I'm interacting with have some special proprietary or non-standard app or not like I see many others doing.
...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)
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.
telegram still sucks, because it is based on phone number as an identifier
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.
Yup. I use this to call home when travelling internationally when I have WiFi. It's very useful. I hope that continues to work.
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.
I wish it did. But, beggars can't be choosers.
We seem to have thoroughly given up personal and home-based computing. Almost every decent app today is cloud-based, and the devices in our hands are just terminals. Personal SW innovation has stalled for so long that my mother can actually run today's programs including Win10 and Office on her 2006 vintage 17" Core Duo laptop with 4GB RAM. The only upgrade I've put in it is an SSD. That's a far cry from the days when the pace of progress required a 3 y/o PC to be re-tasked as a router or something.
I'd love a return to a world where I felt justified to spend $3K on a home server and $2K on my desktop and $1K on displays every 3 years because what I had was totally obsolete.
If Google sold the ability to set up a home server, run their software locally, and then use that as the basis for all of my phone's abilities no matter where I'm at, I would be willing to put down that kind of change instead of doing everything on cloud machines. That kind of move could reignite personal computing, probably opening the door to an explosion in AI hardware diversity that can't happen with the large datacenter approach to computing.
All that said, I won't give up the capabilities I now have without a reasonably equal alternative. Yes, I know of the various open source projects trying to do things like this, have loaded some up, and found them to be less than alpha IMO.
I also realize some phones are trying to do some of this on the phone, but I find that very distasteful. It adds a lot of cost to the phone and only benefits the phone. If I'm going to pay for that kind of AI, I won't it to benefit every device in every room in our home, our PCs, our vehicles, and all of our phones.
The home server approach would balance my privacy concerns with my engineering sense of cost-effectiveness. That could probably also be cost-effectively augmented with a car-based server as the autos get more built-in AI.
There will never be one that works well until companies stop rolling their own and use a standard. The most important aspect of working well is not having to ask someone whether they have or can join a service.
Google seems to finally be taking the high road by supporting RCS or "chat", the only viable SMS replacement I've heard of. It would be nice to see telecom standards for video calls come about too.
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.
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 been using Hangout since the start, it's really a part of my life...
I'm surprised they haven't killed off Gmail and introduced 5 competing services in its place.
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.
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.
Ok gramps, we'll all get off your lawn now.
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?
Google Wave, Inbox.
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.