Successful Failures: Hangouts was fun, but Duo is Better

I have always been one of Google’s early-adopters, ever since the initial roll out of Gmail.  Back in those days, it felt like Google was always experimenting with things and trying to find problems to solve, even though they began life as a search company.  I attribute this digital wanderlust to the old twenty percent policy that Google adopted at its inception.  Essentially employees were free to spend 20% of their time on projects they thought would benefit Google that were outside of their core job.   Arguably this policy gave us many of the apps and services we rely on daily (Gmail, Drive, Maps, etc). 

The obvious downside to early-adopters like myself are the rough edges that can come with early releases.  Most of the time, you just take your lumps with missing features or performance wonkiness (think Youtube Music).  Occasionally you get something like Stadia, which would have been massively disappointing at launch even if Google had managed to slap a big ole beta label on it, like it should have.  But once in a blue moon, you get a service like Duo.

Call me, maybe?

Video-chatting has always been weird for me.  Maybe it’s a generational thing.  As a Gen-Xer, I don’t have to constantly see grand-kids like the Boomers do.  But I am old enough to remember when making a phone call was our only form of instant communication and it didn’t require grooming-checks in the mirror.  Suffice to say, I don’t video-chat often.  At least, I didn’t do it often until the pandemic struck. 

Suddenly the only way to see people’s faces – other than the ones sharing your house, anyway – was to do some form of video-chat.  For me, the obvious choice was Google Duo.  I don’t own a single Apple product, so Facetime was a non-starter.  Whatsapp and Signal chats were absolutely wretched for the handful of times I used them; the latency, background echo, choppy video and tinny audio made them unusable for me.  Duo, however, was an absolute delight. 

I remember calling my sister with it over the summer of 2020.  She’s an iPhone user, but it was trivially easy for her to download and install Duo while I simply used the web app on my Chromebook.  Upon opening the app, I was greeted with the same UI I had become accustomed to from my previous-but-limited user experiences.  Everything “just worked.”  The call was smooth, the audio was clear, there was no echo, and I didn’t even think about the app itself during the call.  All I had to concern myself with was enjoying a few laughs with my sis. 

Duo has pretty much been this way since launch: simple and easy-to-use, and slowly adding features that make sense.  What blows me away is how few people in my orbit knew about it or used it at the time.  It’s a good app with a good UI, it’s available on all the major platforms (web, Android and iOS), and it’s dead simple to use!  After that call, I became a Duo evangelist, telling every friend and family member about it.  I converted my daughter’s violin teacher over when she was doing remote classes.  I started calling customers and business associates using it.  And I silently judged anyone who told me “I don’t want to install another app” or “can’t we just use Zoom”.  It genuinely baffled me that anyone would not want to use it.

In a lot of ways, Duo is the service that Google should talk more about, but doesn’t.  Much like Maps and Gmail, it works silently and efficiently in the background and gets out of your way.  It even gives you a couple of inspired touches like allowing you to leave video messages when the person you’ve called isn’t available, and allowing you to seamlessly toggle between portrait or landscape, even when using the web app.  You could be forgiven for not knowing Duo exists given the ubiquity and success of Facetime – the iOS service has almost become the generic word for video-chatting – but you can’t argue with the fact that Google nailed this service out of the gates, and it only gets better in quality every year. 

I think it helped that Google had a singular, laser-like focus for Duo: make a great video-chat app for everyone.  And luckily Google had some history to draw from since it had already created a great video-chat app years ago.  Through that lens, creating Duo was less a matter of starting from the ground up, and more about liberating it from an older app where it lay buried under layers of bloat and bolted-on features.  Duo, or at least its basic blueprint, needed to be freed from the confines of Google Hangouts.

A video-call, by any other name…

Some of Google’s services have a history that feels like a roller coaster.  Consider Google Messages.  No, that’s too easy, and way too long-winded.  Think about Google Wallet!  It started as Google Wallet, split off Android Pay but kept Google Wallet, merged with Android Pay and Google Wallet to become Google Pay (keep up, folks), and has been re-branded as Google Wallet. 

Google Hangouts’ long, caustic history bears many similarities.  Fun fact: Google Hangouts began life as Google Talk embedded within Gmail (and later with its own apps), way back in 2008.  Then, in 2011 with the growth of Google+, it took on new life as a pillar of Google’s increasingly competitive social network.  But it wasn’t until Google came together to create a unified messaging, voice and video service, complete with a suite of apps in 2012, that I started using it.

Google’s messaging fiasco could really be its own article, so I’m not going to go too deep into it here.  Suffice to say that Hangouts was meant to be Google’s all-in-one communications platform.  It was a Swiss army knife complete with cloud-chat, SMS/MMS, voice calls, and of course, video chat.  But what the history books don’t tell you is that Hangouts was fun!  Behind the scenes, while the old Google Talk was being merged into Hangouts, the two services were actually interoperable, and it was glorious. 

Google Talk (or GChat as we called it) was more of an instant messenger, a relic from the previous decade using the open XMPP protocol to communicate across all computing platforms.  For this golden moment in time, circa 2012-ish, any and every device you could conceive of had access to this Gchat/Hangouts hybrid: Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Phone (remember that?), and even Blackberry!  Just open whatever laptop or phone you had and everyone you wanted to talk to was just there, whether in a group or as an individual.  This was revolutionary for 2012 when messaging was fragmented and there were still a lot of operating systems out there; most apps only supported iOS, and almost none supported all mobile OS’s. 

The simple tie-in of connecting to anyone with a Gmail account created a natural and frictionless on-ramp, without any of the Apple-style vendor lock-in.  If you didn’t want to set anything up or install an app, you didn’t have to.  Just log into Gmail, and everything was there.  (Sound familiar?  It’s a strategy Duo would later adopt).  The crazy part was that video-chatting was just as simple as regular text chatting on Hangouts!  You just hit the camera button, and you were auto-magically looking at the person you were just chatting with.  Look, I know all of this sounds pretty mundane in 2022, but a decade ago, the only reliable video chatting services were Skype and Facetime, and you needed to install apps, have friends on the correct platform, message them via another chat app or SMS first so they knew to take your call, etc.  The ease of video-calling using Hangouts was a big deal! 

I got a chance to experience the magic during a company trip back in 2013.  My 3-year-old daughter wanted to see my hotel room, so I hit the video button and panned my phone around showing her everything, making her giggle.  It wasn’t until after the call was over that it really dawned on me that I had just used Hangouts the same way Apple users connected with Facetime. This was unprecedented in the Android world.

Too much of a good thing

Hangouts was truly a one-of-a-kind service for its time, and it was especially compelling if you were using Android as your primary phone OS.  Android allowed you to use Hangouts as your system default messenger.  Heck, even Google Voice got to crash the party and use Hangouts as an alternate messaging UI. Hangouts could have been the one perfect solution for all things communication-related at Google.  So what went wrong?

With the obvious benefits of hindsight, it’s easy to see why Hangouts collapsed.  It was always built as a set of compromises for the sake of interoperability.  It was crafted for the now, but not for the future.  SMS and MMS were already old and ready to be replaced by RCS, but Hangouts was too burdened by its legacy code to support this.  Video standards and codecs were improving, but Hangouts couldn’t keep up.  Updates only mitigated problems, never fully fixing them, and meanwhile the UI grew more dated and increasingly convoluted. 

By 2016, Hangouts began its zombie-like march to the grave.  Google had realized that apps with a singular focus would allow them to deliver the best user experience; and to that end, Duo and Allo were announced at Google IO 2016 to deliver video and messaging respectively.  Allo ultimately failed, for reasons I will cover in a future article about Google’s messaging journey.  But Duo has been keeping its head down and quietly succeeding for over five years.  Sure, I have read the leaks that Duo will be folded into Google’s video-conferencing app Meet, but I’ll believe it when I see it. 

Video-conferencing and video-calling are two very different use cases and scenarios.  Besides, it reminds me of similar-sounding leaks that ChromeOS would be merged into Android, and we see how that worked out.  In any case, Duo remains a fantastic example of Google learning from past mistakes, narrowing its focus, and then iterating to constantly improve a solid and reliable service. But whatever happened to Hangouts?  In 2022, Hangouts is still alive (barely) as a Google Workspace-only service.  Google is currently migrating Hangout users to – you guessed it – Google Chat.  You can’t make this stuff up.