The tech giant is migrating users to Chat before the axe finally falls on the messaging service in November.
Google informs its users that they urgently need to switch to chat service Chat because they can no longer use Hangouts. The latter would close its doors in November. Enterprise Hangouts users were already migrated earlier this year.
In a blog post, the tech giant explains how to complete that migration if you have yet to start. The migration is free and will take the saved chats and other data with it for the majority of users. You can also use Google Takeout, a data export tool, to download your old chat logs.
The move seems to fit in with a broader sweep among Google’s many messaging services. At the beginning of this month, the company also merged two video conferencing apps, Duo and Meet. Hangouts have been around as a chat platform since 2013 and were gradually added to various services such as Gmail.
However, in 2017, the company launched Chat, with more features such as group conversations. According to Google, Chat also has better security on board around phishing and malicious links. Therefore, that is now the service that survives.
