Google Duo will be replaced by Google Meet in Sept 2025
38 points by phantomathkg 1 day ago | 47 comments- mrtksn 1 day agoDoes anybody knows why Google and Microsoft constantly shuffle their communication apps? Both had the opportunity to be the king but instead they seems to choose to throw away their fortunes? I still remember the times when we used Gtalk as much as MSN messenger and both of those simply disappeared slowly when mobile started dominating and those simply sit tight and did nothing. Then there were numerous replacements and alternatives by both of Google and MS but for some reason they all felt neglected and later shut down. Microsoft bought Skype only to make it worse and shut it down. Considered to buy Discord at some point eventually to abandon the bid. Any insights?
- izacus 1 day agoI bet you can track those changes internally by looking at which VP/Director "won" an internal political struggle and wrangled the project away from others. As a result a new team takes it over and kills the old one.
- spwa4 1 day agoWell what you're really seeing is the result of failed enshittification. Google (and Meta, and ...) built/bought these apps to start an enshittification cycle, and with communication apps it keeps failing, or at least not live up to search or social. So there's a constant fight about how to improve this, a fight which then turns into reorgs and chair dances. Then they fail again, and we do it again. And again.
There's actual competition.
Competition because, let's be honest, nation states are pushing their own internet apps where they are pushing propaganda (We're winning, Zelensky bad), instead of having "BUY THIS CRAP" every second post. And they often actually put some effort into it ("Zelensky bad, because of complicated historical/economic/... argument that we'll describe in 10 posts, 2 pages each, that you'll probably learn something from" [1][2][3] or "China is a great place to live. Don't mind all the people leaving, even leaving to fight for Putin because that's an actual improvement over China's rural cities' conditions or the many fuckups (how many times have all the fish in the Yantze suddenly died this year? I think we're already at double digits). China is the future!", because, like most governments, both the Russian and Chinese government are full of old, educated people)
Not that the propaganda isn't getting worse too. Just look at rt.com's frontpage today vs 10 years ago.
And they actually sound a lot less cringy than Musk does.
[1] https://www.rt.com/russia/618284-what-russian-generals-are-r... [2] https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/618333-joseph-brodsky-nobel-e... [3] https://www.rt.com/business/616820-uae-ai-company-expanding-...
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 day ago> how many times have all the fish in the Yantze suddenly died this year? I think we're already at double digits
Surely this is a misunderstanding. How do “all the fish” in a given river die once, let alone over ten times in a single year? Where did you get that information?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 day ago
- spwa4 1 day ago
- tacker2000 1 day agoIts basically a symptom of them being huge corporations with people in-fighting for top jobs. It seems one route is to create a new mesagging app, the one that “changes everything now”.
These apps are pretty low hanging fruit and not as involved as one like google maps or ms excel, which cannot be easily replaced.
So person X releases the new app, gets promoted, leaves it behind and of course the “next guy” also wants to leave a mark and therefore creates his own.
Its basically a similar reason why a new JS framework gets released every month.
- rvba 1 day agoIt's on the CEO then for allowing that to happen
- rvba 1 day ago
- chneu 1 day agoStaffing changes. People have to justify their jobs. People get hired to create a product, then get shuffled around then nobody cares so the product dies.
Every time there's a leadership shuffle you'll notice products get left behind and eventually retired.
This was especially true in the early-ish days of Google. https://killedbygoogle.com/
- hapticmonkey 1 day agoThis is partly why I take issue with the “iMessage green bubbles are anti-competitive” attitude.
Google and Microsoft mishandled chat so badly they basically handed Apple and WhatsApp the crown in the consumer space.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 day ago> Apple and WhatsApp
Does Meet/Teams even compete with iMessage? They seem to be in competition with FaceTime.
Regardless, Apple still shows green bubbles for WhatsApp users and still offers no way to integrate with the e2ee scheme (and therefore reach blue-bubble status) despite WhatsApp also implementing e2ee. The anti-competitive argument is sound regardless of how shit Google Meet is.
- hysan 1 day agoI think Meet replaced Duo which replaced Hangouts; the latter of which was a good competitor to iMessage. I’m not even sure of the history of all their chat apps anymore because they always have multiple alive at the same time competing with each other. All I know is that they have had chat apps that were pretty good but Google could never stick to just one.
- dieortin 1 day agoApple doesn’t show green (or any) bubbles for WhatsApp users because WhatsApp is not interoperable with SMS or iMessage
- hysan 1 day ago
- maest 1 day agoThose seem like two unrelated issues.
- soramimo 1 day agoCan't both be true?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 day ago
- the_third_wave 1 day ago> Does anybody knows why Google and Microsoft constantly shuffle their communication apps?
They do this to give you an incentive to look for alternatives which you can run yourself. Jitsi Meet for video conferences, XMPP + WebRTC for video calling, something like Nextcloud Talk (i.e. Spreed) for both, etc.
- izacus 1 day ago
- silisili 1 day agoIs Google, or at least the C suite, not absolutely embarrassed by their behavior?
Or is the promotion/churn cycle so high that nobody at all cares anymore?
- izacus 1 day agoI don't think they can hear you over record breaking profit and stock price.
Capitalism doesn't measure itself in "embarassement" or your opinion, it measures via cold hard cash. And Google has been making boatloads of it year after year after year.
Until that changes, a C-suite won't self reflect. They're "winning", aren't they?
- StopDisinfo910 1 day agoThe issue is still the same it was a century ago. Google is more or less a conglomerate. It has no incentive to be performing in any of the business which are not the money printing machine. It just needs to be good enough to kill potential competitors.
That’s why competition law enforcement matters.
- delusional 1 day agoI think this is true on a deeper level. What do we measure progress by? The only thing people ever talk about as a measure of progress is the stock market. How much it's up, how much it's down. Nobody cares about the actual output of the economy at this point. It's all just number go up.
It's not just the CEO's that can't hear anything over the record breaking profit. It's all of society.
- ghusto 1 day agoI'm a little more optimistic, which is boosted by the change in levels of awareness I'm seeing in people around me (not just tech people).
As much as I like to shit on gen-z, one great thing they have going for them is awareness and understanding at levels that were unobtainable for my generation, and it's trickling _up_ to the older generation.
A good example: My generation always ended discussions of counter-productive change with "Well, that's progress!". Gen-z are asking "progress towards _what_?". People are waking up to the fact that common accepted "wisdom" can be questioned.
- ghusto 1 day ago
- StopDisinfo910 1 day ago
- dyauspitr 1 day agoMaybe it’s a viable strategy though marginally hostile to consumers. Let internal teams battle it out and let the cream float to the top? I mean it’s working because I use dozens of Google products everyday, they’re killing it with LLMs and their stock prices are higher than ever.
- izacus 1 day ago
- AnonC 1 day agoThis article from August 2021 on Arstechnica, titled “A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps” still seems relevant. [1]
Google doesn’t seem to have any control over or change in its internal politics and “promotion led new projects” culture (which later get replaced by the same tricks they employed).
If you were to ask someone, even people in Google, which app is Google’s official messaging app, they’d have a tough time figuring it out. It changes by seasons.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
- melodyogonna 1 day agoI thought Google Meet replaced Google Duo a long time ago? I mean, I remember that making the headlines some time back
- izacus 1 day agoBased on what I understand from the article, they're killing off the last remnants of Duo features what were merged into Meet.
- izacus 1 day ago
- ahartmetz 1 day agoOK cool. What was wrong with Hangouts anyway?
- dataflow 1 day agoI'm guessing probably employees didn't want to schedule a "hangout" with their CEO to discuss layoffs, and teachers didn't want to schedule "hangouts" with students or parents to discuss their bad grades, etc.
- politelemon 1 day agoBy extrapolation, managers should be looking to ban "slack" at workplaces, and individual contributors shouldn't use "teams".
- jfoster 1 day agoContrary to what you're suggesting, if you cast your mind back, it seemed a fairly successful product. The question is why they felt the need to "fix" something that didn't really need fixing.
- politelemon 1 day ago
- chneu 1 day agoAt one point I think Google had 4? chat apps. Hangouts, Voice(at one point merged with hangouts), Duo, and Meet. If you wanna count Google+ I think you could.
- selkin 1 day agoThere were many more than four in total. Right now they have more then four (there are completely separate messaging apps hidden inside Docs and Maps).
It is easy to confuse them all, considering those apps got renamed often. By my count, there were four different apps called Hangouts (!), some existing at the same time:
(1) The original Google Hangouts, which replaced Google Talk.
(2) Google+ Hangouts, which was video only. Google+ also had a text messaging app called Huddle.
(3) Google Hangouts Meet, a video chat aimed mostly at the workplace. By the time it was launched Google+ was dead and buried. The “hangouts” was later dropped, making it just “Google Meet”.
(4) Google Hangouts Chat, the equivalent text chat device. They also dropped the word “hangout” from the name, but it was launched as “Hangouts”.
- jfoster 1 day agoThe messaging in Maps has been ended.
https://developers.google.com/business-communications/busine...
I can't bring myself to care enough about whether whatever was in Docs is still going or not. We both know how it will eventually end up even if it is still going.
- jfoster 1 day ago
- IceWreck 1 day agoI think Allo and YouTube Chat were also around for the same time as Duo.
- chneu 1 day agoLol holy shit I've forgotten them. Get your shit together Google
- chneu 1 day ago
- oblio 1 day agoAnd the only good one was Google Talk. Clean, efficient.
- dyauspitr 1 day agoMeet is pretty no nonsense.
- dyauspitr 1 day ago
- selkin 1 day ago
- dataflow 1 day ago
- chneu 1 day agohttps://killedbygoogle.com/ if ya wanna go down nostalgia lane.
- pona-a 1 day agoWhy are they doing it? Google Meet is an organizational conference app, Duo is a one-on-one dialer. If they wanted to have one app for everything, Hangouts would have served that, but they killed it for the organizational Google Chat. Do the people making these decisions do it blindfolded, guided by a two-sentence summary of each product?
- msgodel 1 day agoI just pretend anything other than email, jabber, and SMS doesn't exist (outside my work laptop of course) and I feel like I'm a much more relaxed person because of it.
- wiseowise 1 day agoDuo is a stupid name for a video/chat app anyway, good riddance.
- mieses 1 day agoI appreciate that they killed Google Reader, etc. It made it easier to move on.
- wltr 1 day agoBasically, I stopped trusting them ever since.
- wltr 1 day ago
- tap-snap-or-nap 1 day agoAnother one added to the Google Graveyard.