As noted by 9to5Google (via XDA), users opening the Hangouts app on their Android or iOS will be automatically signed out. A banner that reads “Hangouts is being replaced by Google Chat” also appears on top of the screen. This is accompanied by a “Switch to Chat in Gmail” option. Tapping this button signs the user out and takes them to the chat experience within the Gmail app. Google notes that Hangouts conversations from June 2020 will appear after the migration is complete. “Your conversations from the last year are already in Chat, and older conversations will be available later,” the company said. While notifications will cease after signing out, the app can still be accessed by simply re-adding the account.
Enterprise users of Hangouts have until later this year to make the switch
The aforementioned banner also appears on the web version of Hangouts. The “Open Chat” key on the site redirects users to the Google Chat web app. As noted previously, the mandatory upgrade to Chat for enterprise customers will be implemented later this year. Google said that it would “fully replace classic Hangouts with Chat” by then. Google hasn’t offered a precise date for the closure of free accounts currently using Hangouts. But going by the ‘late 2021’ timeline, it may likely be sometime in December. As part of the Hangouts app’s slow crawl to death, Google has been making some big changes since last year. Google started migrating conversations from classic Hangouts to Google Chats in August 2020. Additionally, Hangouts users started seeing new conversations on the Chats app, which was an indicator of things to come. In April this year, the classic Hangouts lost support for Google Voice and Google Fi. This meant that users had to use Google Voice for calls, text messaging, and voicemails going forward. Thankfully, the process for migration was pretty seamless as existing conversations appeared on Voice, and the user’s phone number was carried over as well.
