Google postpones the retirement of the classic Hangouts app to 2020

Back in January of 2019, Google announced that the company will be retiring the classic Hangouts app in favour of new Hangout Chat and Hangout Meet services. The company even started transitioning users to the new services back in December of 2018.

However, the company has decided to postpone the retirement of the classic Hangouts app for G Suite users. The company has extended the deadline as many customers of Google’s collaboration and productivity suite asked for more time switching to Chat. During this extension period, users will receive support in terms of improved transition experience for group conversations and other features.

Earlier this year, we announced that we will be transitioning classic Hangouts users in G Suite domains to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. At that time, we provided a timeline of changes and said that in October 2019 we would start retiring classic Hangouts for G Suite customers.
Since then, we’ve heard feedback from many of you that you’d like more time to migrate your organizations from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Chat.
As a result, we’re officially postponing the final transition date (i.e. phase 4 in this timeline) to no sooner than June 2020.

– Google

G Suite admins, on the other hand, can join the Accelerated Transition Program through an invitation to migrate to Hangouts Chat. Once the migration is done, the classic Hangouts app will be disabled and users will get early access to the Chat app.