Before Hangouts closes, Google plans to migrate consumers to the Chat and Meet apps

On Friday, we passed along a report that said communications app Google Hangouts was going to be shutdown for consumers in 2020, and would be turned into a platform for business users only. However, a tweet disseminated yesterday by Hangouts product lead Scott Johnston took a shot at the original source of the story, stating that Google has yet to make a decision when Hangouts will close.

According to the tweet, Hangouts "classic" (as it is called internally) will indeed be eventually closed to non-business users. Johnston says that before it does, these Hangouts users will be migrated to the Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet apps. Chat allows users to communicate via Direct or Group Messages, while Meet is a video chat service that can allow up to 50 participants to meet together via video (in G Suite Enterprise Edition). Johnston tweets, "Right now it (Chat and Meet) is only available to G Suite accounts, but before we migrate consumers, that will change." In a separate tweet, he wrote "Migration should be automatic and should be invisible to you as an end user."

When the migration does take place, Google members will be able to use Allo and Hangouts Chat for messaging, Duo and Hangouts Meet for video chats. However, those two Hangouts apps lean more toward group messaging and video.