It has been quite a long wait for Google’s new chat apps – Allo and Duo. But Duo does offer one more easy way for folks to make such a call.
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To get started with Duo, all you need is a phone number. Link it to your Google account and soon it would sprout connections to Gmail, Maps, Google+ – you name it.
Unveiled at the Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View back in May, Google Duo is finally coming to the Android and Apple app stores this week. It’s not what Google had in mind when the product launched three years ago, but sometimes a reboot is necessary. With Allo and Duo, however, things are all set to change. “You don’t hear Google talk about this all that often, but we wanted to enable the human on the other end of the call to really be the experience”. “How it evolves over time, you know, we’ll see”. In latest news, both the apps have been given new icons. Occasionally they’ll be notified of an incoming call after you’ve hung up.
The problem seems to be more with slow broadband speeds than Wi-Fi, as the situation improved somewhat when I moved to a friends house and used their Wi-Fi network backed by NBN fibre.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be consumer confusion going forward, however. Last, you can turn the feature off entirely if you don’t like it. When the network quality gets really poor, Duo will fall back to just audio. Below is a list of recent calls and frequent contacts, with another tab with a full list of contacts who have or don’t have Duo. It was also slightly laggy, but that lag all but disappeared when we tried an LTE call a few minutes later (the lagginess could have been due to a bad Wi-Fi connection).
Fox explained exactly how the handoff feature works. It’s aggressively, obsessively focused on making the best possible mobile experience for video chat, at the expense of all else. Duo always prefers Wi-Fi, assuming the connection is strong enough.
Fox says that otherwise, entering a call can be “prtty abrupt” since you don’t know if they’re lazing at home, in business mode at the office, or on the go. Even the profile pictures in the app are circular so they take up less space. This lets the recipient see a live video of the caller before answering. Or, Google could use this tech to make suggestions about who you might want to call based on your history, location, and time of day rather than just displaying recent calls. The app is compatible with the Jelly Bean version of Android (or later) and with iOS 9 on the iPhone. On Android, Knock Knock works on your lockscreen while on iPhone you have to be in the app to see the video preview. This is because Android provides an API for apps to take over the lockscreen.
Feature-wise, Allo & Duo has nothing special that is able to reel us away from the aforementioned rival apps. Marooning Duo in its own app and not allowing it to connect to any other Google communications apps or websites is a freaky choice.
Here’s a closer look at what it’s like to use Duo. Because the calls are set up via Google’s servers and rely on peer-to-peer technology, encryption is a must to ensure none of the intermediate networks can tap into your call.
By cutting Duo off from its larger platform, Google is essentially making the app work for its success.
All of this makes Duo great, at least on paper. And in our testing, it’s a very snappy video calling app. But it’s still very early days, and while it has many advantages over Hangouts, or even Skype, it’s also missing a ton of features. “We have no plans to evolve it in other directions”, he said.
There isn’t even a way to add contacts within the actual app, let alone important contacts from other apps. You have to do everything manually in Android or iOS.
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Instead of the words Allo and Duo pasted above the backdrops shaped like the chat bubble and video camera respectively, they now appear with the chat bubble and the video camera shapes as the centerpiece of the icon, with a colorful backdrop that fits around those shapes. For one-to-one calls though, it’s a worthy contender.
