WhatsApp did not have video chat features at the time, and Duo was rushed to market (it launched before Allo) to beat WhatsApps' impending video rollout. Both Allo and Duo launched first in India—WhatsApps' strongest market—and Duo was built from the ground up to provide video chat over the slowest Internet connections. The strategy worked, and while Allo died after two and a half years, Duo was able to live on. To my knowledge, Google has never shared active user stats, but Duo became a default Android app in 2016, so it has more than 5 billion Play Store downloads, like every other default Android app.

While Duo was all about Google's WhatsApp envy, Google Meet is a manifestation of Google's Zoom envy. Technically, Meet launched in 2017 as a business video meeting product from the G Suite team, but it was back-burnered for years. When the pandemic hit in 2020 and Zoom usage exploded, Google Meet was drafted as Google's answer.

Zoom had been around for years and was super easy to use. You didn't need an account, just a link, which made it the easiest way to get 30-plus non-technical people into a virtual meeting. Google was a leader in group video chat when it focused on the 2011-era Google Hangouts video service, but the company's constant re-re-relaunching of communication products meant it was caught totally flat-footed when the pandemic hit. Hangouts was dead, and Google Meet was locked behind the G Suite paywall until the end of April 2020, two months into the work-from-home explosion. By that time, everyone had already chosen Zoom as a video solution.

Meet continues chasing Zoom to this day and has 100 million downloads on the Play Store. Taking over Google Duo represents Google Meet getting access to those juicy 5 billion downloads, so it's a major upgrade for the Zoom competitor. Since it's the Duo codebase and package name that's sticking around, a Google support page notes that Meet users will be asked to switch apps to the new Meet once all the merger changes are done.

Meet, being the hot new brand at Google, is naturally surviving the merger. Google Duo originally started as a dead-simple, one-on-one video chat service, which is where the name—Latin for "two"—comes from. Duo had to adapt to the pandemic, too, though, and it now supports 32-person video chats. The name doesn't make a ton of sense anymore, and the more appropriate "Google Trīgintā Duo" just doesn't sound as catchy.

Unlike with certain other Google product transitions, Google is stressing that nobody should lose any features from this merger. The blog post and support page both say that every Google Meet and Google Duo feature will be present after the merger and that there will be no service disruptions. There are even dueling GIFs showing that the two-tap Google Duo way of starting a one-on-one video chat will stick around, along with the hundred-or-so taps it takes to start a Google Meet meeting.

Let's hope it goes well.