Hangouts On Android, iOS Stops Working: How To Save Chats

Going by the announcement made last week, Google is in the process of shutting down the classic app, Hangouts for its users. As a result of the same, many users find that it is no longer possible for them to use Hangouts on their Android and iOS devices. Prior to this, the company hinted at the same by not rolling out any major feature additions to the old Hangouts apps for a few years.

Google Hangouts Shut Down

Now, Google Hangouts is not available for download on Google Play Store and App Store in recent months. Users who launch Hangouts get the prompt that it is time for chat in Gmail, which acts as a forced upgrade on their device to use the dedicated Google Chat apps or the Gmail tab. When this screen pops up, users will no longer be able to access the classic app on their mobile devices.

However, the shut down of Hangouts might not be a major disruption as a vast majority of messages have already been migrated to Chat in Gmail. Some conversations or parts of conversations will not be migrated automatically from Hangouts to Chats. The company has announced that it will send an email to the impacted users with more details sometime in September this year.

Recently, several hundreds and thousands of users and Google accounts have received this prompt. Last week, most of these users were still able to see their conversations and could send new messages but it is no longer the case. Besides Android and iOS devices, Google is also disabling the Chrome extension of Hangouts on desktop. With this move, the classic app will stop working in the sidebar of Gmail as well.

How To Save Hangouts Data

Having said that Hangouts is no longer available, Users are promoted to use PWA (Progressive Web App) at chat.google.com or Chat in Gmail. Users can still use Hangouts by heading on to hangouts.google.com until October this year but it will stop working afterwards and users will be able to download the data or history via Google Takeout.

You can take a look at the steps below to save Hangouts data on Google Takeout.

Step1: On your device, go to the browser and open Google Takeout.
Step 2: Click the 'Deselect all' option at the top as you just have to export the Hangouts data.
Step 3: Now, scroll down until you see the Google Hangouts option. Here, you need to check the box beside it.
Step 4: Click on the option stating Next Step.
Step 5: As this might likely be the last time you will be using Hangous, you need to select the option Export.
Step 6: Here, you will be able to choose the file format from the drop-down menu and select the maximum size per file.
Step 7: That's it, you can click on 'Create export'.

After following these steps, you need to wait for Google to create an export file. The process might take some hours or even days depending on the data available. This is a server-side process and you can leave and check on your emails later on to get the file. Once you get the file, you just have to click on Download to get your export.