Google original Hangouts will start to disappear this October

 Google Hangouts is  finally going away — and if you’ve been dreading the day you’ll have to replace it with the perhaps much nicer-looking Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, we’ve got some

brand-new guidance from Google on when the switch will be happening.

 

Namely, October to start. That’s when Google will start retiring the classic Hangouts app for its G Suite customers — aka companies that pay to use Google Apps — according to an official blog post. So that’s when you should expect to hear the first wave of people complaining about being forced to switch, even though it’ll only be those G Suite customers at first. 

Google says that it won’t start killing off Hangouts for regular users until those G Suite customers are all comfortably using Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, so “normal” folks won’t have to worry about it for a while longer. Last we’d heard, the death of classic Hangouts wouldn’t come until 2020, and that seems pretty likely given this guidance.

 

Hangouts isn’t the only Google messaging app on the chopping block, by the way. The company’s also killing off Allo, another in-house chat app experiment.