Google is officially transitioning its chat services from Hangouts to Google Chat on Gmail. The classic Hangouts will start disappearing from Google Workspace accounts starting in March with Google chat set to take over as the default chat application from March 22. Users who try to access Hangouts will be redirected to Google Chat.
This is not the first time the tech giant is evolving its messaging strategy. Google discontinued its original messaging app GChat or Google Talk in 2017 before the transition to Hangouts in the same year.
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The company announced the development of Google Chat in 2020 and is now embarking on the migration that will see Google Workspace users get priority before the rest of Gmail users are migrated.
Google says that all Chats in Hangouts will be migrated to Google Chat except for a few special cases. The migration is not optional, meaning all users will be automatically migrated to the new service. The company also says that the Hangouts domain will also continue working .
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