All of Google Meet’s features are coming to Duo, app to be renamed “Google Meet” later this year

Just days after Jaxon wrote his piece about the innovations that Google Duo made over Hangouts and how it was better, Google is saying goodbye to it. Despite what you may read in the headline, Duo itself sure will be dead and gone as a brand, but its features and the app itself will live on as Google Chat – let me explain.

You see, even though the company has had a long and complex history of changing and killing off, and merging its communications apps, it’s not done yet. Now, it’s “bringing Google Meet’s features to Duo for a single, integrated video solution”. Over the next few weeks, all of Meet’s features – group calling for up to 32 people, doodles and masks, and more – to the Duo app, and later this year, it’s rebranding it as…you guessed it – Google Meet! Who would have thought, right?

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.

Jaxon Lee – Successful Failures: Hangouts was fun, but Duo is better

Basically, after splitting its efforts across many avenues, Google is merging everything back together at last (again) and trying the whole “let’s have one app to rule them all” approach. I’m not mad though. While I do love Duo and personally use it for family video calls because it’s integrated into my dialer app on Pixel, Google Meet did add more than 100 features and improvements over the past two years. Things like a new, intuitive interface, virtual backgrounds and effects, live captions, and auto-light adjustments as well as noise cancelation.

Duo simply doesn’t have all of this, and if the best part of Duo is being added to Meet (or the other way around, as both are technically true and the end goal is to make Duo disappear forever) then I’m in favor of this. All I care about is a one-tap solution for starting a personal video call without having to message my fiance a link to a scheduled or live Meet.

The whole idea of using Meet as a personal calling tool has never really worked for this reason, but I hope this changes with the Duo merger. Earlier this year, Google was caught trying to merge the two but then stated that it gave up. Now, it looks like it’s moving forward with that plan at an accelerated pace!