We all know by now that the Hangouts as we know it will soon be gone and replaced with…well, still Hangouts but in a different form in Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Well if you’re attached to the classic version, you may have gotten a small reprieve as the transition period, which was supposed to start this October 2019, has now been moved to June 2020. This is because of the clamor from G Suite users to give them more time for the switch.
The initial timeline had G Suite users being the first to fully transition to Hangouts Meet and Chat starting October 2019. But customer feedback indicated that they wanted “more time to migrate” from the Hangouts that we’re still using now to the new ones that Google created. So because of this, the transition phase will begin on June 2020, still starting with G Suite customers.
However, we do not know how long that period will last just yet and Google said they will be providing advanced notice when they have a more definite timeline. If G Suite admins want to start the migration to the new Hangouts, they can request to be part of the Accelerated Transition Program which will disable the current Hangouts and migrate them to the new one, getting early access to the new features.
One other undisclosed reason why they may have delayed the transition is because they want to improve some things about Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet before letting a huge number of the public onto it. This is still good news for users as having a better chat and video call platform is always beneficial, even if you don’t understand why they created a “new” product that still has a similar name instead of just totally changing it or just improving the current one we have.
In any case, for the regular users of classic Hangouts that are not on G Suite, we will probably be forced to transition by late 2020, if they stick with the new timetable which will begin by June 2020 for G Suite users.
