Google, the king of seemingly a thousand different messaging and communications efforts, has announced a rare move today: It does not add another new service or chat-related feature, but cuts the list down by one. Google Meet and Duo have had overlapping video calling functionality for years, and the company has decided it’s time to bring the two together under the Meet name, fulfilling the long-rumored merger between the two services. Oddly enough, the actual path to this merger will favor the Duo app.
For a brief piece of history, the Duo was announced at Google I / O 2016 along with the then-defunct messaging service Allo, whose brief history was an example of Google’s often late to the party and half-baked efforts to bring its own. spin on an existing product category. Where Allo failed, the Duo succeeded, at least in part because of the many integrations it captured that made video calling so easy. When something is easy to use, you use it, and making a video call on the Duo is as easy as calling someone on the phone given its call integration.
On the other hand, Google Meet emerged as Hangouts Meet, a video conferencing service built into Hangouts (which is also dead now, can you see a pattern?) And broke out into its own thing in 2020. Although Hangouts Meet was not widely used, Google Meet rose to popularity as a Google service-integrated alternative to Zoom during the pandemic (nor did it hurt to make it free to use).
Google Meet on a phone, computer and smart screen.
Today’s announcement of a merger was rumored as far back as 2020. The idea was reportedly abandoned in 2021, when Google is said to shift its focus more on Google Meet. A recent demolition earlier this year indicated that the Duo was set to retrieve some features from Google Meet, in hindsight, and telegraphed that Google had not completely abandoned the idea and work continued.
According to today’s announcement made on the Google Workspace Updates blog, Google Duo and Meet merge into one app. This is a change that will probably also apply to Google and Meet elsewhere, e.g. on smart screens and the web. “All the Google Meet features”, including scheduled meetings, meeting chat, content sharing, real-time subtitles and an improved call size limit, will make their way into the Duo app in the coming weeks, along with Meet’s platform and service integrations with others Google products.
Later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. According to The Verge, which received exclusive information regarding today’s announcement, the old app will be renamed “Meet Original” before becoming obsolete.
A more Duo-like interface for Google Meet.
One of Google’s executives claims that it sticks to the Duo app instead of merging things into the Meet app, because “The Duo mobile app, according to The Verge, had a lot of sophistication, especially under the bonnet,” but there’s probably a lot more important reason why Google chose it: user base.
While Meet’s branding seems to be more valuable or useful to Google (probably because it can charge for its use via Workspace), Meet only has somewhere over a hundred million installations in the Play Store, while Duo has over five billion as it is a built-in app on many phones and probably a necessary part of Google’s services integration and licensing. That means keeping things together in Duo will put the new United Meet on multiple customers’ phones, and the company has been obsessed with promoting Meet – in 2020, the Gmail app was also frustratingly inflated to include Google Meet in a change that was generally panned by customers.
On the web, Google will apparently use Meet as the base for the new unified system.
Google does not exactly “kill” the Duo with this change, but the features that resided in two different apps will soon be available in just one. For a company that is often criticized for duplicating its own efforts and randomly killing projects, it may indicate a shift in strategy to choose to consolidate the two so neatly and cleanly.
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