Google announced today that it will merge two of its video calling apps, Duo and Meet, into one platform. Pretty soon, there will only be Google Meet which the company hopes will do almost everything users need.
By bringing the two applications together, Google hopes to solve some of the problems of modern communication tools.
“It's important to understand how people choose which tool they want to use, for what purpose and in what circumstances," says Javier Soltero, head of Google Workspace.
Our digital lives are full of many different chat applications, and each comes with its own rules and contact list, some for business and some for personal.
Google hopes to use Gmail addresses and phone numbers to compile all of these.
Soltero preaches this idea of "accessibility" for most of his tenure at Google, which led Google to integrate Meet and Chat into many of its other services.
It's a good goal, but it comes at a cost: the release of all of these apps has made some of Google services messy and complicated.
In the last two years, Meet has become a powerful platform for meetings and group chats of all kinds, while the Duo has remained more like a messaging app. So Google promises to bring all the features of the Duo to Meet and seems convinced that it will work.
Duo will not be effectively retired. The app, which originally launched in 2016 as an easy way to make one-on-one video calls, does a number of very useful things that Meet doesn't. First, you can call someone directly—including their phone number—instead of uses sending links in an invitation. Duo has always been more like FaceTime than Zoom in that sense.
As the two services become one, Google will use the Duo mobile app by default. Very soon, the Duo app will receive an update that brings Meet features to the platform, and later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet application will be named "Meet Original" and will eventually be removed.
It. Sounds confusing, but Google claims it's the best way to go.
“The Duo mobile app was complex,” says Dave Citron, product manager video of Google, "especially in emerging markets, where network connectivity has been highly variable." On the web, it's different. Meet is the much more developed online platform, which forms the basis of the new unified system. But in both cases, "the idea is 100% functionality," Citron said.
Meet has already been integrated into so many Google services that it could become a real competitor to WhatsApp and FaceTime almost overnight.
We'll see…
