Just the other day Google announced Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, two new services that are based on Google’s Hangouts platform that are aimed more towards enterprise users. This is in line with Google’s claims last year that Hangouts would now be focused more towards business users.
However the question is what will become of the consumer version of Hangouts? Like we mentioned in our previous report, despite these new services, the regular version of Hangouts continues to exist and function as per normal, but for those wondering if it’s only a matter of time before Google shuts it down, you don’t have anything to worry about.
@andrewkingmusic it’s not going anywhere
— Amit Fulay (@amitfulay) March 10, 2017
In a tweet by Amit Fulay who is the head of product for Allo and Duo, he responded to a question by a user by saying that consumer Hangouts won’t be going anywhere. However it’s not hard to imagine that perhaps in the future, Google could start to devote more resources to its enterprise Hangouts which could eventually lead to them sunsetting the consumer version of the platform.
However we guess that was kind of the point of Google launching their Allo and Duo messaging and video chats, but for now if you and your friends or family members still rely on Hangouts to keep in touch, you can rest assured that it won’t be going anywhere, for now.