Google closes Hangouts, upgrades to Google Chat

San Francisco: Google has ended Google Hangouts, a text, video and voice chat app built into Gmail, and upgraded it to Google Chat.

On Tuesday, the Google Hangouts web app provided its last offering to the users. After that time, users were redirected to Chat on the web, according to an official report.

Also, the Google Hangouts app is no longer available on Android or iOS. Google Chat comes with a modern, feature-rich experience that will allow users to react to messages with emojis that feature skin-tone selections, respond with smart replies, format text with rich-text editing, tag specific people with@mentions, and search for and share GIFs.