Other than integrating it with Meet, Google wants to abandon Duo | Rumor - HDblog.it

In the summer of 2020, rumors emerged that Google was working to merge Duo and Meet into a single video calling service, which was able to meet the needs of both private and professional / corporate users. Now the same source, that is the colleagues of 9to5google, says that this plan is skipped: the idea is to always get to have a single service, but basically ending Duo and keeping Meet more or less as it is.

According to the information that has just emerged, the choice to abandon Duo and focus only on Meet (therefore to abandon consumer customers in favor of the enterprise one) would have been taken already at the end of 2020. We have no reasons to explain this choice, but the source explains that the development team of the two apps, which had been unified precisely in view of the merger (codename "duet": Duo and Meet), is now working almost exclusively on Meet. The development of Duo, on the other hand, is progressing very slowly.

When asked for comments, Google responded with an official statement that "there are no changes to the plan to continue investing in our consumer users". The company then lists a number of features added to Duo in the last 18 months, and objectively the list is quite substantial:

The source, however, expresses several perplexities in considering it a sign that the development of Duo is active. For example, the new UI has been simplified to make the app easier to maintain; the support for tablets and folders and the launch on Tizen was necessary to fulfill a contract signed with Samsung; and other innovations were already in the pipeline before the merger of the two teams.

In short, does this mean that Duo is also about to end up in the increasingly crowded cemetery of Google services abandoned after a few years? For the moment it is difficult to say, but as we have seen there are some signs that suggest yes. And there is another, perhaps the most significant of all: Google says a "rich roadmap for both business and consumer users" is planned for the coming year, but is careful not to mention Duo specifically.

If Duo were indeed abandoned, Android would in fact find itself without an integrated and native alternative to Apple's FaceTime. We know that it is not widely used in our part of the world, but in much larger and more relevant markets than ours, for example the US, it is quite a big deal. For the moment we can only wait for further developments.