Google Terminates SMS For Hangouts Feature

For Android users who either have Android 4.4 KitKat or have upgraded to Android 4.4 KitKat, you might recall that one of the changes Google made included consolidating both SMS and Google Hangout chats in a single Hangouts app. This is fine since Apple did the same for its Messages app which allows both iMessage and SMS sending.

However one of the criticisms was that it was hard to differentiate between a Hangout message and an SMS, although to encourage more users to switch to the Hangouts app, Google introduced a feature called SMS for Hangouts, which was basically a way for Google to forward Hangout messages to users via SMS, in the event that the user did not have data.

Well the good/bad news is that if this is a feature that you use quite often, you will be disappointed to learn that Google will be officially putting an end to it on the 2nd of July, which is today, so if you wake up and find that the service no longer works, it is because Google has decided to kill it off once and for all.

How does this affect users? Well your Hangout messages will no longer be received as SMS messages, but other than that, the Hangouts app will retain its functionality and will house both SMS and Hangout messages together. Google has not made any announcement regarding the termination of this feature, so perhaps it wasn’t that popular to begin with.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, Google, hangouts