Although the immense popularity of built-in chat in Gmail has led Google to create a standalone tool and application, it seems so. Hangouts are no longer the best. And it is applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack that are gradually gaining a larger role on the personal and work scene.

That’s why Google decided to cancel the Workouts section of Hangouts last February and has now begun the process of migrating to the new free Google Chat messaging service. As the company details in an announcement on its official blog, users who use the Hangouts mobile app they will be prompted to switch to the new application.

However, Hangouts still do in the desktop application can continue to be used until next Novemberassured Google that it would start notifying users at least one month in advance of the start of the migration to the new app, marking the end of this year as the maximum date that Hangouts would become part of its familiar app. cemetery.

So no matter the platform, everyone our Hangouts conversations are automatically transferred to the new app. However, Google also offers us the opportunity to use the Takeout service to download a copy of our data before the official suspension of the application in November, which we can use as a backup for manual upload to the new platform.

Unlike its now defunct GChat tool (also known as Google Talk), the new Google Chat will offer some added featuresincluding direct calling, creating online threads in Spaces (room rebranding), and sharing and viewing multiple images.