Change is an inevitable part of life, and for those of us who welcome Google products and services into our lives, we sure get a lot of it. Then again, just because Google has a habit of killing things off doesn’t mean it’s necessarily swift about it, and for literally years now we’ve been reading the writing on the wall for Hangouts. Now as the push to Chat moves through its final phases, Google’s taking a big step towards putting Hangouts down for good and delisting the app for both Android and iOS
The App Store change was initially spotted earlier today by the team at 9to5Google. Apple users who already have Hangouts installed on their phones and tablets can continue using the messaging service (for now), but its days are numbered.
While at first this looked like a move that was only affecting Apple users (at least for today), within the past hour Google has also started pulling its listing for Hangouts on the Play Store. We’re still seeing it live in some regions, so Google may currently be in the process of shutting it down everywhere, and users who already have the app installed can still access the listing. If you really need to install the app you can always try sideloading by grabbing a copy over at APK Mirror, and for the time being, the Hangouts web interface is still live.
Google’s actively been moving Workspace users away from Hangouts to Chat, and it’s only a matter of time before that extends to everyone — better start getting comfortable with that change now.
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