In what looks to be a clear attempt to phase out the old Hangouts and turn it into a more business-specific app, Google is now reportedly removing the app's SMS capabilities. The new change will take effect in May, according to an email sent out to G Suite administrators.
Coming back to Hangouts, users who have enabled Hangouts as the default SMS app, will be notified from March 27 regarding the change. Users will also be directed to set another chat app as the default. If the user does not have any other chat app pre-installed, Google will redirect them to Play Store to download another chat app.
“Last year, we announced several improvements to the most popular features of Google Hangouts, such as the new video meetings experience and better group chat messaging. As part of that ongoing effort, we will be removing carrier SMS text messaging from Hangouts on Android after May 22, 2017”, the email shared on Reddit said.
Things are a little confusing as Google Voice users. While such users will be able to continue sending messages using their Google Voice numbers as they did before but will be unable to send carrier SMS messages via Hangouts from May 22.
Google is currently facing a strong competition from the likes of Slack and the recently launched Microsoft Teams in the enterprise segment. For end users, Google hasn’t really been able to put forth Hangouts as the preferred messaging application over the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It may be recalled that while Google allowed users to enable Hangouts as the default messaging app, it later launched a standalone Messenger application for a similar purpose. Google is now clearly focusing on its three new messaging applications like Google Duo for video calling, text-based Allo and the recently introduced Android Messages.
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