Last year in August, Google promised that they will be “soon” adding the audio calls feature to their Duo app. Despite this, the company did not offer an exact date for their product update, and it seems that “soon” meant 7 months, since only now we see that they are rolling out the feature for people around the world. The official announcement came from Amit Fulay, who is the head for product for Google Allo and Duo at Google, and who posted on Twitter about the happy news.
Advantages
Google is now promising that their new feature will not use up large amounts of data, and it will be able to run okay even in low-connection conditions. This is great news for everybody, but especially for the users found in Brazil and India, who are keen on using as less mobile data as possible. The video calling application was announced by Google back at the I/O 2016. It was meant to be an alternative for WhatsApp and for FaceTime, Apple’s popular product.
This update has puzzled some of the fans though. They have been wondering why does Google insist to keep separate apps that have pretty much the same purpose, as is the case with Duo and Allo. However, we don’t have an official answer at this point, and nobody at Google seems to want to clarify this.
Meanwhile, Google Duo seems to be really popular on the developing markets. Fans there have repeatedly asked the company to bring them this new audio call feature, so it is highly anticipated in their respective countries. Yet again, instead of creating a clear and consistent strategy, Google wants to update the two apps separately.
In the beginning of March, the company has also released an Allo update that brought improved support for GIF and emoji.
Leave a Reply