SMS is Being Removed from Google Hangouts on May 22nd

It’s pretty clear that Google’s social messaging aspirations are a bit of a mess right now. Hangouts has been incredibly popular within the community due to its widespread market penetration (mostly by being forced on everyone as a pre-installed application on Android devices), but Google clearly has different plans in mind. Hence they launched two new mobile-first applications, one for regular text messages and then a completely separate one for video calls. At the time, many were still hoping that Google hadn’t abandoned Google Hangouts and that it would get a big optimization update, but again, Google had different plans in mind.

Google has said they wanted to pivot Google Hangouts into a more enterprise service with the announcement of Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat. Most of the Google Hangouts APIs will be shut down at the end of next month, but there’s a Google employee that says the consumer portion of Google Hangouts will not be going anywhere. With the recent updates to Google Voice as well, it’s just difficult to see what Google’s vision is for the future of social messaging.

Now, a G Suites administrator posting on Reddit says they received an email from Google that states the company will be removing carrier SMS capabilities from Google Hangouts on May 22nd. Before people with a Google Voice number get too worried though, Google was sure to say this change “only applies to SMS text messages sent and received from carrier phone numbers.” SMS messages sent with Google Voice will still continue to be supported after May 22nd.

We have two months until this happens though, and Google will start to prepare current Google Hangouts users by displaying in-app notices on March 27th. This notice will remind them of what is going on and suggest they set a different application as their default SMS application. If you don’t use the SMS feature in Google Hangouts, then you won’t even see this in-app notice as the change will not apply to you.

Source: /r/Android

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