As a default Android app, Google Duo has more than 5 billion downloads on the Play Store while Meet only has 100 million. The install base is probably also a factor here. That efficient video chat system will be the basis for the new combined app, with Google building Meet’s meeting link functionality into Duo and rebranding it. WhatsApp didn’t have video chat at the time, so you could use Google Duo video chat with Facebook’s WhatsApp or Google’s Allo, if you wanted.Īllo and Duo were originally focused on India, which led Duo to build a one-to-one video chat system that used little bandwidth and worked well on unstable connections. Rather than integrate video chat into the app, Google split video functionality into a separate app called Google Duo. Google lost and spent the next two years making a WhatsApp clone called Google Allo. Google and Facebook got into a $22 billion bidding war for WhatsApp two years earlier. Google Duo came out in 2016 alongside the “companion app” Google Allo as a reaction to the growth of WhatsApp. Google Meet was still locked behind a paywall during the initial months of the work-from-home era, and while it eventually became as easy to use as Zoom, it was after Zoom became a household name.
Google Meet was technically created in 2017 as a group business video chat application called “Google Hangouts Meet,” but it really became a major project after Zoom’s growth exploded in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Meet and Duo video services were both built as reactions to Google’s far more stable communication competition.
That means there are now two apps called “Google Meet.” Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps “Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app” and “Google Meet: The updated Duo app.” The “Google Meet (original)” app will someday be put out to pasture it’s just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. So Google Duo is being rebranded to Google Meet, and the existing Google Meet app is sticking around for a bit. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more.
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