Google Meet was still locked behind a paywall during the initial months of the work-from-home era, and while it eventually became as easy to use as Zoom, it was after Zoom became a household name.Īllo and Duo were originally focused on India, which led Duo to build a one-to-one video chat system that used little bandwidth and worked well on unstable connections. Google Meet was technically created in 2017 as a group business video chat application called 'Google Hangouts Meet,' but it really became a major project after Zoom's growth exploded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Meet and Duo video services were both built as reactions to Google's far more stable communication competition. That means there are now two apps called 'Google Meet.' Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps 'Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app' and 'Google Meet: The updated Duo app.' The 'Google Meet (original)' app will someday be put out to pasture it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. So Google Duo is being rebranded to Google Meet, and the existing Google Meet app is sticking around for a bit. Google's various rebrandings are all on a rollout, so they'll arrive at different times for different people, but Google says the complete rebrand should finish for everyone by September. According to Google's PR email (no links, sorry), people will begin seeing Duo's app and website branding swap over to Google Meet this week.

Google announced the merger in June, with the plan to keep the Google Meet brand name while merging the best of both code bases into the Google Duo app. Google is officially kicking off the merger of its two video chat apps, Google Meet and Google Duo.

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