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Think about Google Wallet! It started as Google Wallet, split off Android Pay but kept Google Wallet, merged with Android Pay and Google Wallet to become Google Pay (keep up, folks), and has been re-branded as Google Wallet. No, that’s too easy, and way too long-winded. Some of Google’s services have a history that feels like a roller coaster. photos credit: The Verge A video-call, by any other name… Duo, or at least its basic blueprint, needed to be freed from the confines of Google Hangouts. Through that lens, creating Duo was less a matter of starting from the ground up, and more about liberating it from an older app where it lay buried under layers of bloat and bolted-on features. And luckily Google had some history to draw from since it had already created a great video-chat app years ago. I think it helped that Google had a singular, laser-like focus for Duo: make a great video-chat app for everyone. You could be forgiven for not knowing Duo exists given the ubiquity and success of Facetime – the iOS service has almost become the generic word for video-chatting – but you can’t argue with the fact that Google nailed this service out of the gates, and it only gets better in quality every year. It even gives you a couple of inspired touches like allowing you to leave video messages when the person you’ve called isn’t available, and allowing you to seamlessly toggle between portrait or landscape, even when using the web app. Much like Maps and Gmail, it works silently and efficiently in the background and gets out of your way. In a lot of ways, Duo is the service that Google should talk more about, but doesn’t. It genuinely baffled me that anyone would not want to use it.

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And I silently judged anyone who told me “I don’t want to install another app” or “can’t we just use Zoom”. I started calling customers and business associates using it. I converted my daughter’s violin teacher over when she was doing remote classes. It’s a good app with a good UI, it’s available on all the major platforms (web, Android and iOS), and it’s dead simple to use! After that call, I became a Duo evangelist, telling every friend and family member about it. What blows me away is how few people in my orbit knew about it or used it at the time. All I had to concern myself with was enjoying a few laughs with my sis.ĭuo has pretty much been this way since launch: simple and easy-to-use, and slowly adding features that make sense. Everything “just worked.” The call was smooth, the audio was clear, there was no echo, and I didn’t even think about the app itself during the call. Upon opening the app, I was greeted with the same UI I had become accustomed to from my previous-but-limited user experiences.

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She’s an iPhone user, but it was trivially easy for her to download and install Duo while I simply used the web app on my Chromebook. I remember calling my sister with it over the summer of 2020.

But once in a blue moon, you get a service like Duo. Occasionally you get something like Stadia, which would have been massively disappointing at launch even if Google had managed to slap a big ole beta label on it, like it should have. Most of the time, you just take your lumps with missing features or performance wonkiness ( think Youtube Music). The obvious downside to early-adopters like myself are the rough edges that can come with early releases. Arguably this policy gave us many of the apps and services we rely on daily (Gmail, Drive, Maps, etc).

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Essentially employees were free to spend 20% of their time on projects they thought would benefit Google that were outside of their core job. I attribute this digital wanderlust to the old twenty percent policy that Google adopted at its inception. Back in those days, it felt like Google was always experimenting with things and trying to find problems to solve, even though they began life as a search company. I have always been one of Google’s early-adopters, ever since the initial roll out of Gmail.