Google Duo

Meet is the video calling service that Google wants you to use. However, Duo’s functionality still lives on, and group video calling in Google Meet was broken for a whole week. 

At the start of August, Google replaced the Duo logo with Meet’s four-colored icon only to bring it back due to user confusion. With the latest update to Google Meet, the Duo icon is once again gone on Android.

An update to the new, merged Google Meet app last week brought back the blue Duo icon as some people were confused by the transition, which is now continuing with a new account switcher and other changes. 

In an amusing turn of events today that’s most likely a bug, an update to Google Meet (which was previously the Duo app) on Android brings back the Google Duo icon. As such, you now have two ways to launch the same application.

In recent days, the Meet merger widely rolled out to Google Duo for Android and iOS. Google is now readying to start the next phase where the Meet icon and name replaces Duo’s following a mobile app update.

As we spotted earlier this month, Google Meet is adding a “live sharing” feature that “allows all meeting participants to interact with the content that’s being shared,” including YouTube, Spotify, and a handful of games.

At the start of last month, Google announced that Duo is becoming Meet and adding all of its features over the coming months. Google Duo’s Meet merger is now beginning to roll out on Android. 

Back in June, Google announced that it was merging Duo with Meet in a migration that’s currently underway. As part of that, Google’s first “Meet” app is now called “Meet (original)” with a different icon.

Google Meet is set to gain a new feature, “stereo separation” of call audio, ahead of the app being merged with Google Duo.

In August of 2020, 9to5Google reported that Google was planning to replace Duo with Meet. This development was finally made official today – and will see the app that the vast majority of Android users have installed on their devices get renamed to Google Meet later this year.

Recent reporting suggested that Google Duo would soon be gaining a handful of features to match Google Meet, but our research suggests otherwise.

Android 12 might be the biggest update to the OS for some time, and it appears it has had a knock-on effect with issues and problems cementing a rocky start to life for the update. A prominent issue that some have encountered is an audio bug in Google Duo, which luckily is set to be resolved soon.

We broke the news last year that Google was eventually going to replace Duo by making Meet its only video calling service. That remains the case, but the resulting product will be primarily focused on enterprise and is no longer internally pitched to be a merger of the two apps, as Google has no plans to create a dedicated consumer-oriented video offering.

Google’s various Material You revamps just keep coming, today with the arrival of Google Duo’s redesign.

With Meet getting Google’s full attention over the past year, Duo has not seen a meaningful update in quite some time. Google Duo is soon receiving a homescreen redesign that adds a “New Call” button that hopes to simplify the app.

At the end of 2019, Google Duo and WebRTC creator Justin Uberti became a high-ranking engineer for Stadia. The Google Distinguished Engineer announced today that he was joining Clubhouse, the audio social media app.

Google has unveiled Lyra, a new technology that allows Duo, and soon other apps, to offer natural-sounding voice chat with as little as 3 kilobytes per second of network bandwidth.

Update: Google has now made Lyra open source for other apps to use.