What Happened to Google Hangouts?

Google Hangouts no longer exists. Google shut it down on November 1, 2022, after moving its users to Google Chat for messages and Google Meet for video calls. Hangouts On Air, the live broadcasting part, had already gone in 2019, replaced by YouTube Live.

If you used Hangouts for years, the end may have felt sudden. It actually came in pieces over almost a decade. Here's how it unfolded.

Where Hangouts came from

Hangouts started in 2011 as a video chat feature inside Google+, Google's social network. You could start a "hangout" with friends, and up to ten people could join a group video call in the browser. At the time that was unusual. Most group video still needed a downloaded program.

In 2012 Google added Hangouts On Air, which let you broadcast a hangout publicly and save it to YouTube. Podcasters, teachers, bands and small businesses used it as an easy way to go live. Third-party add-ons for lower thirds, name tags and on-screen graphics grew up around it, and that's the world the original HangoutMagix site was part of.

On May 15, 2013, at its I/O developer conference, Google turned Hangouts into a standalone messaging and video app. It replaced Google Talk and the Google+ Messenger, and it showed up in Gmail, on Android, on iPhone and in a Chrome extension.

The slow split

Hangouts tried to be text chat, video chat, SMS and broadcasting at once. Over the next few years Google pulled those apart.

• 2016. Google announced that Hangouts On Air would leave Google+ and fold into YouTube Live on September 12, 2016. The same year it launched two separate apps, Allo for messaging and Duo for video calls. Neither replaced Hangouts directly.
• March 9, 2017. Google split Hangouts into two business products for G Suite (now Google Workspace): Hangouts Meet for video meetings and Hangouts Chat for team messaging.
• August 1, 2019. Hangouts On Air was discontinued entirely. Live broadcasting now meant YouTube Live.
• April 2020. With video calls suddenly everywhere, Hangouts Meet was renamed Google Meet and made free for anyone with a Google account. Hangouts Chat became Google Chat.
• October 2020. Google announced that Chat would become free for everyone and would replace classic Hangouts.

The shutdown

The final move took most of 2022.

1. Workspace (business and school) accounts were moved from classic Hangouts to Chat starting early in 2022.
2. On June 27, 2022, Google announced the shutdown date for everyone and started showing Hangouts users in-app prompts to switch to Chat.
3. Around July 2022 the mobile apps stopped working for most people, and Hangouts in Gmail was replaced by Chat.
4. On November 1, 2022, the Hangouts website was turned off and redirected to Chat.
5. Google kept a Hangouts download available through Google Takeout until January 1, 2023.

Most conversations were copied into Google Chat automatically, though not every message or attachment made the move.

What to use now

The parts of Hangouts live on under different names.

Messaging and group chats

Google Chat. It works in a browser at chat.google.com, inside Gmail, and in its own app on Android and iPhone. If you had Hangouts conversations, look there first.

Video calls

Google Meet. It runs in a browser with no download, has apps for phones and tablets, and works from Gmail and Google Calendar. Google Duo, the consumer video app from 2016, was merged into Meet in 2022 as well.

Live broadcasts

YouTube Live. To get the on-screen graphics people used to add to Hangouts On Air, most streamers now use a streaming tool such as OBS Studio or a browser-based streaming studio, and add overlays there.

Hangouts video calls compared with Meet

If you mostly used Hangouts for video, Meet will feel familiar. You still start or join a call from a link, in the browser, without installing anything on a computer. The differences show up once you're in the call.

Meet was built for meetings first, so it handles larger groups, scheduled calls from Google Calendar and screen sharing more smoothly than Hangouts ever did. It also added things Hangouts users had to fake with add-ons: background blur, custom virtual backgrounds, live captions and noise reduction. Some of the more advanced features depend on whether you use a free Google account or a paid Workspace plan, so the menus you see may not match a colleague's exactly.

What Meet doesn't do is broadcast publicly the way Hangouts On Air did. For that, stream to YouTube Live or another platform with dedicated streaming software.

Can I recover old Hangouts messages?

Start with Google Chat. Sign in with the account you used for Hangouts and look at your conversation list. Messages that migrated appear as ordinary Chat conversations.

If you downloaded your data through Google Takeout before January 1, 2023, the archive you got has your conversations as files. You can open them with a text editor or a JSON viewer.

If you didn't do either, and the conversation isn't in Chat, it's very likely gone. Google no longer offers a separate Hangouts export, and anyone promising to recover deleted Hangouts history for a fee deserves a lot of suspicion.

What happened to Hangouts graphics?

Many of the add-ons and graphics tools built for Hangouts On Air, including the original version of this site, stopped working when the platform ended. The idea behind them still makes sense: a consistent look for your calls and streams, with your name on screen and a background that doesn't show the laundry.

That's what HangoutMagix does now, independently and for today's apps. The studio makes 1920 x 1080 virtual backgrounds for Meet, Zoom and Teams, plus transparent name tags and lower thirds for streaming software. Our guide to setting a custom background walks through uploading one in each app.

HangoutMagix isn't affiliated with Google. The Hangouts name is used here only to explain the history.

FAQ

When did Google Hangouts shut down?

Google shut Hangouts down on November 1, 2022. After that date the Hangouts website redirected to Google Chat. The mobile apps had already been switched off for most people earlier in 2022.

What replaced Google Hangouts?

Google Chat replaced Hangouts for messaging, and Google Meet took over video meetings. Both work in a browser, in Gmail and in their own mobile apps.

Can I still get my old Hangouts messages?

Most conversations were moved into Google Chat automatically, so check Chat first. Google offered a Hangouts download through Google Takeout until January 1, 2023; that option is gone now.

What happened to Hangouts On Air?

Hangouts On Air, the live broadcast feature, moved to YouTube Live. Google stopped offering it on Google+ in September 2016 and discontinued it entirely on August 1, 2019.