Sounds promising. But not sure what this adds on top of Hangouts, which has a great group (and of course one to one) video calling feature. The only difference seems that Duo works with phone numbers, not Google Accounts.
This limits and subtracts from Hangouts for no real benefit.
Hangouts works on phones, tablets and laptops. It does voice, video and text. Fragmenting these features across apps and devices seems to be a major step backwards...but apparently two apps is simpler than one?
This strategy seems to have born out of Facebook's success with breaking up the app into specialized features (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp etc.)
The only break up here was Messenger, and even there they did not just continue the feature but gradually phased it out to make sure people are actually following. Messenger still uses the same network behind and did not create a separate one.
Instagram and Whatsapp are just examples of how not to kill a successful product. Turns out it's quite simple: You change nothing.
>Instagram and Whatsapp are just examples of how not to kill a successful product. Turns out it's quite simple: You change nothing.
For a long time it seemed like the strategy was to change nothing. Now it's become clear the strategy is to be scared of changing anything, just leave it to fester and fall behind then panic and recklessly start cloning competitors features and diluting what made the service compelling in the first place.
"The only difference seems that Duo works with phone numbers, not Google Accounts"
Which is a huuuuuge difference. This is the same factor that made whatsapp so popular on the smartphone compared to all other other chat apps that were popular at the time (including google talk) but where each system was using a different account creation/login flow on that tiny screen, Whatsapp came along and had the brilliant insight/accident of simply supporting your phone's addressbook to find you and your friends. Even facebook chat couldn't keep up with them even though facebook app was installed pretty much on every internet connected phone at the time. Rest is history.
Yes, being tied to Google account does seem limiting, after all there are more phone numbers than Google Accounts. I have a gut feeling that one of Allo and Duo will be a success.
Email addresses are generally not in your phone's addressbook while phone numbers always are. Also, SMS based phone number verification is quick and easy (and completely automatic on Android without any user action required).
If they do indeed use end-to-end encryption, there should be nothing to store/learn for Google. Though without it being open source, there's no way to be sure. Unless maybe they start collaborating with Moxie, as Whatsapp did.
