Google duo the company’s video chat service for consumers, will soon merge with Google meetup the company’s video chat service for business users
The Duo app will soon get all of Meet’s features, including scheduled calls, and then, once the transition is complete, change its name to Google Meet. At that point, the current Meet app will simply launch the new Duo/Meet app. It’s a bit complicated, but to be fair, moving millions of users to the new platform was always going to be a heavy lift.
All of this isn’t a major surprise, given that Google has already sunset, Duo’s chat-focused sibling. Both launched to a bit of confusion in 2016, as Google already offered a bunch of text and video chat options at the time. Now Google is finally consolidating most of these under the Chat and Meet brands.
Javier Soltero, Google’s GM and VP, told me that this move has been in the making for quite a while. Back in 2020, the company brought the Duo and Meet teams together with the goal of collapsing these two products into one. “We think it’s incredibly important and strategically critical for Google to be able to serve the full breadth of the video market, from consumer use all the way to organizational and commercial use with a common service platform and a product whose user experience is guided by the same sense of simplicity and intuitiveness,” he explained.
Dave Citron, the director of product management for these products, also noted that as the pandemic hit, both Duo and Meet suddenly saw their usage increase rapidly and found a new kind of product-market fit. That led the teams to look for ways to iterate more quickly. “The great thing about bringing the teams together is that we’ve brought some of the best of both products to each other, strengthened the foundation and … it’s now fairly straightforward because of the work we’ve done over the last few years to take that final step and actually bring them fully together,” Citron explained.