It has been a good run, but Google has finally decided to bring an end to its Hangouts platform. This as the company is looking to migrate users over to Google Chat, which became freely accessible in October 2020.

Now, those using the mobile version of Hangouts will start to see notification popping up and prompting them to migrate over to Chat, with access to Hangouts elapsing in November this year.

The push to Chat is mainly due to Google investing far more time and money into that service than Hangouts, with a larger push to beef up its Workspace offerings. As such, it is more feature rich and is getting improvements all the time, according to the company.

“Moving to Google Chat opens up new and better ways to connect and collaborate. For example, users can edit Docs, Slides or Sheets with side-by-side editing, making it easier to collaborate while continuing the conversation,” it effusively notes in a blog post.

“Google Chat also includes Spaces, a dedicated place for topic-based collaboration. Groups and teams can share ideas, work on documents, and manage files and tasks, all from a single location. And, the new integrated view in Gmail makes it easier to use Chat alongside your Gmail inbox, Spaces, and Meet,” it adds.

Those concerned about the data they have stored in Hangouts have no need to worry, say Google, as conversations will automatically transfer to the new app.

“For most people, conversations are automatically migrated from Hangouts to Chat, so it’s easy to pick up where you left off. However, we encourage users who wish to keep a copy of their Hangouts data to use Google Takeout to download their data before Hangouts is no longer available in November 2022 by following these instructions,” the firm concludes.