Google to Merge Google Meet and Duo Features

Google announced Wednesday (June 1) that it is integrating Google Meet features with Google Duo to create a more unified communications service.

The company said it will eventually do away with the Duo brand, focusing instead on its Google Meet platform, Ars Technica reported Thursday (June 2).

Duo, the tech giant’s video chat app, rolled out after the company failed to buy WhatsApp in 2014. Meanwhile, Meet is a business video meeting product which was initially put on the back burner until the pandemic and Zoom brought about more of a need.

The Ars Technica report speculated that the Duo codebase will likely live on as the basis for the new version of Meet, and Google said that the video calling features from Duo will be “here to stay.”

Google said that the next few weeks will see additions of Google Meet features to the Duo app to let users schedule video meetings or use video calling to connect with others. The company added that later this year, the Duo app will be renamed to Google Meet and will function as a video communications platform.

The report noted that this development comes after Google unified its communication teams under Google Workspace Vice President and General Manager Javier Soltero in 2020.

However, the tech giant didn’t clarify which products are being unified, and the report speculated that Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Messages, Google Duo and Google Voice may all be under the same banner going forward.

Google has been working on trimming down outdated apps on its app store, a practice Apple has also been doing. Google Play, through doing this, would go from 2.6 million apps to 1.7 million.

See also: Google, Apple to Cull Outdated Apps from Stores

Google had announced this in April, and said it would be operating on a two-year cutoff plan which would start in November. There have been critiques of this idea, however, because not every older app is necessarily broken, nor is it a live service meant to be updated indefinitely.