According to the source, this decision was the result of the fact that Google’s consumer communications services in May this year came under the leadership of the head of the G Suite division Javier Soltero (Javier Soltero). It was he who allegedly announced to employees that the coexistence of Duo and Meet did not make sense. According to reports, Google intends to make Meet a one-stop video calling service for both general and corporate users. Internally, the process of merging the two services is known as Duet.

As a reminder, the Google Duo service was announced at the annual I / O 2016 conference as part of the company’s new strategy to develop a messaging service that was supposed to replace Hangouts. While Google Allo’s messaging service was failing, Duo has managed to succeed as a video calling app. Since then, Duo has added tools for organizing group calls, a web client, and the ability to send audio and video messages.

Despite this, the popularity of Google Meet has skyrocketed in recent months, driven by the coronavirus pandemic. When people around the world were forced to self-isolate, Google began to actively promote Meet, putting in a lot of effort to make it compete with Zoom. According to Google, at the end of April this year, the service was used daily by about 3 million unique users, and the time spent on videoconferences in a month was more than 3 billion minutes.

The source notes that the merger of services can take up to two years. Key Duo features such as end-to-end encryption support, video calling with a user by phone number, 3D effects, and more are expected to gradually migrate to Meet.