Hangouts still has a future for consumers, for now

You've probably heard that Google is planning on taking Hangouts into the business space away from consumers, but there are a ton of questions over whether or not Hangouts will still be available for you to use to chat with your buddies. Your non-business buddies, anyway.

The short answer is yes, fortunately. Amit Fulay, the head of Allo and Duo, was asked on Twitter what all of these announcements mean for current Hangouts users, to which he replied: “It's not going anywhere.”

Good news, right? Well, mostly. Even apps like Slack will still let you use them to communicate with anyone else that's on the service, and Hangouts will almost certainly follow that route. If you currently talk to people through Hangouts, as long as everyone keeps the app installed there's no reason why it should ever stop working. The biggest concern is how updates and features are going to play out over the next few years, and that's probably not going to be great for Hangouts diehards.

As for the other two elephants in the room, Fulay also tweeted that Google is investing in Allo and Duo for the long run, so don't expect the focus to shift away from those anytime soon. Maybe pulling resources from Hangouts will help Google build up Allo into what we all want it to be.

source: Amit Fulay (Twitter)
via: Droid Life