Google Announces Retirement of IM Service Google Talk

Google has announced that their free messaging service, Google Talk, will be fully transitioned to Hangouts and officially retired. Google Talk was launched in 2005 as a simple device to help Gmail users chat among themselves. In 2013 Google introduced Hangouts which offered improvements over Google Talk such as advanced group video calling and was able to integrate seamlessly to with other Google products. Now the company will no longer support both apps and is encouraging users of Google Talk to move and adopt Hangout with open arms.

According to Google, contacts should migrate over automatically with very little change in the user experience. There are some that might be sad that they will not have the ability to use beloved Gchat anymore but more than likely, users will just star using Hangouts. Probably the most alarming change to the scores of Google Talk users was the announcement that Google will be killing their very popular Google Talk for Android application making it no longer functional.

Google Hangouts will also undergo some changes and will be losing its SMS support. This function will be added to Android Messages which is scheduled to receive features like, read receipts, group chat, hi-res photo sharing and more, sometime in the near future.

Here is a partial list from Googles G Suite Team on the other streamlined updates that will be introduced:

• Upgrading Google SMS to Android Messages
• XMPP federation with third-party services providers no longer supported
• Legacy Google Talk Android app (introduced in 2013) to stop functioning
• Retiring several Gmail Labs and Google+ functionality in Gmail

Google will be informing Talk users that the Google Talk service and the other functions listed above will not be available after June 26. Google encourages users to subscribe to the G Suite Whats New Calendar to monitor retirement dates for these and other user features.