Google brings you the best of Duo and Meet in one app

Back in August 2020, it was reported that Google was planning to abandon Duo video chat app in favor of its other video conferencing service Meet, and now there has been official confirmation that these two separate products will be merged into one platform. More specifically, Google Meet will soon be the only one left, and Google hopes it will become the one universal platform for video calls.

Google Duo video chat was announced back at I/O 2016 alongside Allo messenger, which joined Google's digital product graveyard in 2019. Since then, Google has significantly expanded the functionality of Duo, adding the application to the standard set of core Android applications. And now it's time to say goodbye to Duo. Google has been actively simplifying messengers and communication services: Hangouts messenger has been replaced with Google Chat, and the Gmail client continues to turn into a communication hub in accordance with the company's current strategy: mail in the current version of the program has only one tab of the four main ones (the rest three are Chat, Spaces and Meet).

In the past few years, Meet has grown substantially to become a powerful platform for meetings and group chats of all kinds, while Duo has remained more of a messaging app. Google is promising to bring all of Duo's features to Meet, and the team seems to be a firm believer that it will eventually combine the best of both worlds into one product. In fact, in the process of merging the two services, Google will rely on Duo. Duo is getting a big update soon, bringing tons of Meet features to the platform, and Duo will be rebranded as Google Meet later this year. The current version of Meet will be renamed Meet Original and will eventually be discontinued.