Google is getting ready to kill Duo for the second time

Anyone who’s been using Google products and services for any length of time is well aware of the company’s proclivity towards… let’s say “reorganizing” things. Branding gets updated, new services are introduced, products split off, products get combined, and sometimes Google just has to kill one off. A few years back, Google was in the middle of one of these periods of reinvention for its communication apps, and that meant merging Meet with Duo.

In the end, we lost Duo as we knew it, and saw it absorbed into Meet. But even as that happened, Google let users continue to access some of that old functionality, presenting it as “Legacy (Duo) calling.” If you were still a fan of doing things the old way, we’ve got some bad news for you, as Google now shares its intent to finally cut off all this legacy support sometime this coming September (via 9to5Google).

If you haven’t really been staying on top of the whole split between Duo and Meet (or just understandably stopped caring after the transition back in 2022) here’s a quick overview of the features that Google says legacy users will be losing as Meet drops its support:

That may sound like you’re losing quite a lot, but we have to keep in mind that Meet’s been at the forefront of Google’s development efforts these past few years, and consequently offers a modern, feature-rich call experience that the vast majority of users are likely going to prefer, anyway. That includes niceties like cloud encryption and live captions.

One unexpected casualty may be how video calls work on Google’s smart displays like the Nest Hub Max. Google’s transition FAQ explains that Nest devices only support legacy calls, so it feels like the Hub Max’s already limited call support may be downgraded even further — likely to non-functional status, by the sound of it.

Hopefully we’ll be hearing a little more about the minutiae of this transition, including exactly when in September we can expect to see it take place, over the time between now and then.