San Francisco, Jan 23 (IANS): Google has announced the timeline of the transition from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet for its paying G Suite customers.

The tech giant said that Hangouts retirement will start in October 2019.

Starting April 16, Chat will become available on the web for G Suite domains that have classic Hangouts enabled, but it won't replace Hangouts just yet. Between April and September 2019, several Hangouts features will come to Chat, ahead of the former's shutdown in October, the VentureBeat reported late on Tuesday.

However, Google won't kill off Hangouts for regular users until those G Suite customers are all comfortably using Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, according to The Verge.

The death of classic Hangouts wouldn't come until 2020, and that seems pretty likely given this guidance, The Verge report added.

Hangouts was launched as a replacement for Gchat in 2013 by the tech titan but has been losing features in recent years as the company has stopped updating the app and has taken away SMS messaging.

However, Hangouts still is a prominent chat option in Gmail on the web and the app also exists on the Google PlayStore.

Google Hangouts is a communication platform developed by the company which includes messaging, video chat, SMS and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) features.