The switch from Hangouts to Chat has been in the works since October 2019. After that, it'll be gone forever, in yet another example of the inevitable “link rot” style loss of data that constitutes life on the internet. Access to the Hangouts Chrome extension was also revoked.Įven now, all the chat history that you might have tied up with Hangouts over the years can still be recovered, but there's a deadline for saving it as well: Google Takeout will let users download their data up until January 1st, 2023. By mid-year, users lost access to the Hangouts mobile app, and were guided to upgrade to Chat, either within Gmail or via the separate app.
