Google Hangouts is shutting down for some users in October

Google’s Hangouts chat and video conferencing app is going away this year, at least for some users. 

On Tuesday, Google announced that its Google Hangouts service is shutting down for G Suite customers in October 2019. It will be replaced by Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet.

G Suite is a paid suite of certain Google Apps which is used by companies and organizations. The company reportedly plans to shut down Hangouts for all users in 2020, but that hasn’t been officially confirmed. 

For G Suite administrators, the timeline is a bit more complex and is explained in detail here. But for G Suite users, Chat will start being available on web and mobile in April (though Hangouts will still remain available). From April to September, certain features from Hangouts — such as Gmail integration, Google Voice calls and chatting with external users — will be migrated to Chat, and in October, classic Hangouts for G Suite will be retired. 

There’s no word on when, exactly, Hangouts will be retired for all users; Mashable has reached out to Google regarding this and will update this article when we hear from them. 

Google is shutting down another one of its chat services this year; Allo, which launched in 2016, never really took off, and it’s going away in March 2019.