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Allo, Google?

google meet

Google’s Duo will rebrand as Meet with the features from both apps. But Google’s Meet’s will remain Meet.

Yes, there will be just two Google Meet apps: Meet (let’s call it 1.0, the Meet app to be soon phased out) and the new Meet (let’s call it “2.0,” the new Meet app that combines both Meet and Duo). The combined app lets you conduct one-on-one and group meetings (attendance size increases from 32 to 100 participants) with in-meeting chat and live share content to support interaction with all participants on the call.

There is integration with other tools, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Assistant and Messages among others. By September, at which point all original Meet users and all Duo users should be working from the updated Google Meet.
In the coming months, anyone accessing the Duo website will automatically be redirected to Meet.

This tricky rebranding (with Duo being rebranded as Meet with all the features from both apps while Meet gets an updated look) isn’t Google’s first rodeo in this product category which prompted THE VERGE last year to put together a timeline of Google’s messaging app escapades.

During the past 15 years, more than a dozen messaging services for text, voice and video calling were introduced by Google. (Including Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Google Chat, Google Workspace, Google Spaces, Google Talk, Google Allo and Google Currents (among others)). Most, if they survived at all, ended up absorbed, transformed or reformed.

You could call The Verge’s Google timeline entertaining as well as informative. But it highlights the ability for tech giants to constantly try iterations until they hit the right combo.

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Earlier this year, Google said Hangouts will shut down in November to favor Google Chat (which when launched in June 2021 coincided with Google Rooms being changed to Google Spaces).

Google has also ended third-party support for Google Talk (also called GChat) last month.

So, in summary, at Google … let’s have no Talk, no Hangouts. We can Chat or Meet. But not in Duo. And no Rooms, just Spaces.

And please don’t try to say Allo. Google already said “Goodbye” in 2019.

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