Google will ‘increasingly focus’ Hangouts on business customers

It’s been more than three years since Google formally launched Hangouts. It was an effort to take the popular Google Talk IM app into the mobile age, but it came late to the party. Lots of competitors like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage were firmly entrenched in mobile chat by the time Hangouts came to life. Despite finally getting a chat and video-calling platform out for every platform, Google announced at its I/O developer conference earlier this year that it was trying again. A new video chat app, Duo, is now available, and a radical new text-based messaging app called Allo is coming soon. Ever since they were announced in May, Google users have wondered: What’s to become of Hangouts?

Google’s VP of communication products, Nick Fox, was willing to talk about that when he gave me an early demo of Duo last week. As Google said earlier this year, Hangouts isn’t going away — but the company will now focus Hangouts on its business users. Going forward, Allo and Duo will be the company’s main consumer chat plays.

“Because Hangouts is built on a Google account, because it’s deeply integrated with Google apps, the Apps suite [things like Drive, Docs, etc.], Gmail, Calendar and so on, it’s seen much more success in the enterprise,” Fox told me. “It will increasingly focus on that kind of group collaboration enterprise productivity space.”

Duo’s focus is extreme simplicity, and anyone who’s used Hangouts for any length of time will admit it’s not the simplest of services. For example, you can do video calls with multiple participants in Hangouts, while Duo allows only one-to-one video calling. That need to make things easier is likely why Google wanted a clean break with the rollout of Allo and Duo — they aren’t tied to your Google account or any of its previous communication services.

Fox also said Google recognized that it didn’t make sense to have one app do everything, something we’ve seen from companies like Facebook, which controversially broke messaging out of its main app. “We’ve historically tried to do a lot in a single app, but the reality is that are pretty different types of communication,” Fox says. “We see them differently, and we think we’ll be able to build the best experiences by building focused experiences that do what they’re intended to do really, really well.”

That doesn’t mean there won’t be consumer confusion going forward, however. Hangouts will continue to exist, and many consumers will certainly still use “Gchat” when looking at their email in a browser. But when they go mobile, Allo and Duo are entirely separate experiences with no desktop equivalent. Google may be focusing Hangouts on the enterprise crowd going forward, but there isn’t a clear path to moving consumers from Hangouts to Allo and Duo.

Of course, for lots of users, that likely won’t matter. Google is right to make mobile its focus because that’s clearly where consumers are. If Duo and Allo are successful, Hangouts will simply fade into memory, used by people who need its more-robust feature set. It’s not what Google had in mind when the product launched three years ago, but sometimes a reboot is necessary.

Duo, Google’s supersimple video chat app, arrives today

Back in May at its I/O developer conference, Google introduced a pair of new communication apps: Allo for text-based communication and Duo for video calling. Allo is the more interesting of the two, with its deep usage of the intelligent Google Assistant bot — but Duo is the one we’ll get to try first. Google hopes it’ll stand out among a bevy of other communications apps thanks to a laser focus on providing a high-quality mobile experience. It’s available today for both the iPhone and Android phones.

“The genesis of Duo was we really saw a gap when it came to video calling,” Nick Fox, Google VP of communications products, said. “We heard lots of [user] frustration, which led to lack of use — but we also heard a lot of desire and interest as well.” That frustration came in the form of wondering who among your contacts you could have video calls with, wondering whether it would work over the wireless connection you had available and wondering if you needed to be calling people with the same type of phone or OS as yours.

To battle that, Google made Duo cross-platform and dead simple to use. You can only call one person at a time, and there’s barely any UI or features to speak of. But from a technology standpoint, it’s meant to work for anyone with a smartphone. “It shouldn’t just work on high-end devices,” said Fox. “It should work on high-end devices and on $50 Android phones in India.”

Google designed it to work across a variety of network connections as well. The app is built to provide HD video when on good networks and to gracefully and seamless adjust quality if things get worse. You can even drop down to a 2G connection and have video pause but have the audio continue. “We’re always prioritizing audio to make sure that you don’t drop communications entirely,” Fox said.

All of this is meant to work in the background, leaving the user with a clutter-free UI and basically no buttons or settings to mess with. Once you sign into the Duo app with your phone number (no Google login needed here), you’ll see what your front-facing camera sees. Below that are a handful of circles representing your most recent calls in the lower third of the screen. You can drag that icon list up and scroll through through your full list of contacts; if people in your phonebook don’t have the app, you can tap their number to send an SMS and invite them to Duo.

For those who do have Duo, tapping their number initiates a video call. Once you’re on the call, you just see the person you’re talking to, with your video feed in a small circle, not unlike Apple’s FaceTime. Tapping the screen reveals the only UI elements: a hang-up button, mute button and a way to flip between the front and back cameras.

Duo is even simpler than FaceTime, and far simpler than Google’s own Hangouts app, which the company says will now be more focused on business and enterprise users. In that focus on simplicity, Fox and his team left out a number of features you might find in other video-calling apps. Chief among them is that Duo can’t do group calls; it’s meant only for one-to-one calling. Google also decided against making desktop apps for Duo or Allo.

“We forced ourselves to think exclusively about the phone and design for the phone,” Fox says. “The desktop experience is something we may build over time. But if you look around the world at the billions of people that are connected to the internet, the vast majority have one device, and that device is a phone. So it was critical for us to really nail that use case.”

That’s part of the reason Google is tying Duo to a phone number rather than your Google account: Your phone already has your contacts built in, while many people might not curate or manage their Google contacts list. This way, you can see exactly who in your usual phone book is using Duo (and if they’re not, you can send them an SMS invite).

Perhaps the most clever feature Google included is Knock Knock. If you’re using an Android phone and someone calls, you’ll see a preview of their video feed on the lock screen. The person calling can wave or gesture or make a silly face to try and draw you into the conversation, and Fox says that makes the person on the receiving end a lot more likely to answer with a smile rather than a look of confusion as they wonder if they video is working properly. For the sake of privacy, you’ll only see a video feed from people in your contacts list, and you can turn the feature off entirely if you prefer.

It’s all part of Google’s goal to make the app not just simple but “human” as well. “It’s something that you don’t generally hear from Google when we talk about our apps,” Fox admits, “but video calling is a very human experience, so it’s very important that you feel that in the app as well.”

All of this adds up to a product that is refreshingly uncluttered and has a clear sense of purpose. It doesn’t fundamentally change the video-calling experience, but it is frictionless and very easy to use on a moment’s notice. Under the hood, the app does live up to its promise of updating the call based on changing network conditions — you can even flip between WiFi and cellular networks without dropping a call. There’s not a whole lot to say about the experience, and that’s probably for the best. You can make calls to people in your contacts list easily, not worry too much about dropping them, and then get on with your life.

That ease of use is what Google hopes will pull users into the app. It does indeed feel simpler than most other options out there. But given the huge variety of communication apps available and Google’s strange historical difficulty with the space, it’s not hard to imagine Duo being a niche app. That won’t be for lack of effort — Duo actually does make video chat easier than making a phone call.