Google Duo is a free app for smartphones, computers, tablets and smart displays. The number of people participating in a group conversation has been gradually increasing since the app was launched in 2016. And by 2021, Google has already expanded simultaneous access to video chat to 32 people.
Among the variety of online messenger platforms that are united by their purpose and the need to connect to Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G internet to share data, there are also products from Google. A new app called Duo was added to Android in 2016.
Previous variations of Google mobile messengers (Talk and Hangouts) failed to attract the attention of users, while Google Duo became a more interesting variant of the software of this category. Among the many useful tools from Google, the application for making video calls has taken a worthy place in the Android arsenal.
The Google Duo app is used for the same purpose as other popular video messengers. The functionality of the service offers the following benefits:
A special feature of the app is called Knock Knock: the recipient of the call will see the caller’s camera image even before he answers the call. This should help him decide whether to pick up the phone right away.
However, the Program differs from the others by lacking some features. For example, you cannot share files in Google Duo, which can make it difficult to organize conferences and other work processes.
Until the summer of 2022, Google supported two video communication services: Duo and Meet, aimed at different audience segments – private and corporate use. The services differed in a number of tools: Duo had an internal messenger with public and private chats, and Meet offered online presentations and video communication with support for up to 250 participants.
In August 2022, Google moved most of Duo’s tools into the Meet environment, then renamed the service Duo to make it easier for users to find the app. Soon after, the service was renamed again. Today, Duo and Meet are different names for the same video calling service.
What is Google Duo?
Google Duo is a free video chat app for mobile devices, created by Google in 2016 and characterized by ease of use. And the software can work not only on Android, but also on iOS and in the browser. With Google Duo you can contact users for free and have a comfortable dialog with them even with poor internet quality. The application is protected by privacy settings, and the simple interface helps you to understand it quickly.
In terms of visual identity, Google Duo is a pretty consistent product, which had just one significant redesign of its logo, happened in 2019. Even though, the colors and shapes remained the same, the refined version looked stronger and more modern.
The original Google Duo logo, created in 2016, featured a combination of a bright blue minimalistic icon and a light-gray lettering in a simple sans-serif typeface. The icon depicted a white and gray stylized video camera image, set against a solid blue drop-like background. It was clean, fresh, and looked very professional.
The redesign of 2019 has simplified the style of the icon, yet intensified the shades of blue and gray. The lettering was also slightly refined — with the contours of the characters becoming more distinctive, and more air let inside the shapes and between the letters. The gray shade, which was adding volume to the original icon, was removed, and now the badge got flat and laconic, with just a small vertical gray line, making the camera’s fragment overlapping each other.
The gray lettering from the primary logo of Google Duo is executed in the corporate Google font, with the first part set in a bolder style. The closest commercial fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Intervogue Medium, or Ascent Pro Semi Bold, with some minor modifications, including the diagonal bar of the letter “E”.
As for the color palette of the Google Duo visual identity, it is based on a simple, yet fresh combination of gray, blue, and white, which stands for security, reliability, and professionalism.