Google Hangouts is a communication platform that has been developed by Google. The application comes with many features such as VoIP, SMS, video chat and instant messages.
In fact, it replaces three messaging products that Google has managed to implement within this application (Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and Hangouts). The big search engine company has also stated in the past that Hangouts has been designed to be the future of its telephony products (Google Voice). In fact, the company has also integrated into Hangouts some of the features that are available in Google Voice.
Unfortunately, the Hangouts application doesn’t have too many users at the moment and things will get worse, because the company decided to remove the SMS feature from it. Hangouts version 18 is currently rolling out, but, for now, it doesn’t come with any functional changes.
However, the new version of the application comes with a code which is informing that the “SMS” feature is moving out from Hangouts application. At the same time, the application is suggesting users to switch to a different SMS app. According to reports, Google will most likely remove the SMS functionality entirely sometime soon, with the exception of Google Voice.
We have to mention that Google has already confirmed the SMS functionality removal from Hangouts via an email sent to GSuite administrators. In the specific email, Google has mentioned that it has announced last year many improvements to the most popular features of Google Hangouts (such as new video meeting experience and improved group chat messaging), but despite of its efforts, it will remove the carrier SMS text messaging from the application on Android after May 22, 2017.
The good news is that the SMS messages sent from Google Voice will remain after that date, which means that this application will continue to be supported.
Leave a Reply