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Google Will Start Retiring Hangouts For G Suite Users In October (techcrunch.com)
In a blog post, Google clarified the timeline of the transition from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet for its paying G Suite customers. "For them, the Hangouts retirement party will start in October of this year," reports TechCrunch. From the report: For consumers, the situation remains unclear, but Google says there will be free versions of Chat and Meet that will become available "following the transition of G Suite customers." As of now, there is no timeline, so for all we know, Hangouts will remain up and running into 2020. As for G Suite users, Google says it will start bringing more features from classic Hangouts to Chat between April and September. Those include integration with Gmail, the ability to talk to external users, improved video calling and making calls with Google Voice.
These apps worked better together. In Hangouts, I could be texting someone, decide I'd rather talk to them and call them via my Google Voice account by tapping a single button. Later if I decided to switch that call from a voice call to a video call, I could do that with another video tap. If I then decided to add someone else to the video call, I just had to add the extra person. All from withing Hangouts. The only thing it didn't support was seamlessly transferring cellular calls to VoIP and vice versa.
Now if you want to do the above, it's a confusing hodgepodge of different apps. You have to text someone with Messages or Allo (I'm still not sure what the difference between the two is). If you decide you'd rather talk with them, you have to switch to the Google Voice app, look them up in your contacts, and initiate the call. If you then decide you want to change it to a video call, you have to hang up and call them again on the Duo app. And if you decide you want to add a third person to your video call, you have to end the Duo call, start the Meet app, and call everyone all over again.
I still don't understand why they're killing off Hangouts. The replacements are an app that does only messaging, an app that does only VoIP, an app that does only video calls, and an app that does only video conferencing. Hangouts was a communications app. Its closest analogue was Skype, where you could video conference between multiple people, or a single person, or disable the camera to get just a voice call, or just type messages to each other. It made sense to tie all of these into a single app, so all you had to do was pick what mode of communication you wanted at that moment - text, voice, video, or conference video.