Google is officially starting the merger of its two video chat apps, Google Meet and Google Duo. Google announced the merger in June, with the plan to keep the Google Meet brand while merging the best of the two code bases into the Google Duo app. According to Google’s PR email (no links, sorry), people will start seeing Duo’s app and website branding swap in Google Meet this week. Google’s various rebrands are rolling out, so they’ll arrive at different times for different people, but Google says the full rebrand should be out for everyone in September.
So Google Duo is being renamed to Google Meet, and the existing Google Meet app is staying a bit. That means there is now two applications 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 one day be put out to pasture; it’s just staying put while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow it?
The video services Meet and Duo were created as reactions to Google’s much more stable communication competition. Google Meet was technically created in 2017 as a group business video chat app called “Google Hangouts Meet,” but it really became a major project after Zoom’s growth exploded in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. 19. Google Meet was still locked behind a paywall in the early months of the work-from-home era, and while it eventually became as easy to use as Zoom, it was only after Zoom became a familiar name.
Google Duo came out in 2016 along with the “companion app” Google Allo as a reaction to the growth of WhatsApp. Google and Facebook entered into a $22 billion bidding war for WhatsApp two years earlier. Google lost and spent the next two years making a WhatsApp clone called Google Allo. Instead of integrating video chat into the app, Google split the video functionality into a separate app called Google Duo. WhatsApp didn’t have video chat at that time, so you could use Google Duo video chat with Facebook WhatsApp or Google Allo, if you will.
Allo 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. This streamlined video chat system will be the foundation of the new combined app, with Google bringing Meet’s meeting linking functionality into Duo and rebranding it. Install base is probably a factor here as well. As the default Android app, Google Duo has over 5 billion downloads on the Play Store while Meet has only 100 million. Google’s way makes the transition smoother for those 5 billion installs, while the 100 million will have to switch manually. Google says it will hide the old, original Google Meet app from App Store searches in September. Finally, you’ll need to implement a pop-up message for existing users of the old Google Meet app to prompt them to upgrade.
This move is happening because Google “unified” its messaging teams in 2020, with a single person, Google Workspace vice president and general manager Javier Soltero, taking the reins of “all mass communication products from Google”. That should mean Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Messages, Google Duo and Google Voice, and Google even threw in the app for Android phones for good measure. It was announced last month that Soltero is leaving Google, so it’s only been two years of unifying messaging work. No one knows who, if anyone, will fill the position of new “message boss.” The Singles plan is still happening, but in addition to this Meet and Duo merger, Hangouts will finally be shutting down in a few months. This new, more cohesive lineup will leave one Google video app and three Google chat apps.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technique.
