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Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

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Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#82
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, now I have to find my friends' phone numbers. Is this targeted to people in developing countries who use apps like WhatsApp? Those people don't have fast enough mobile internet to make video calling work.

WhatsApp is not specially an emerging market product, I think it is the most popular chat app in a bunch of European countries.

Yea I think the US is definitely an outlier there; Out of the couple dozen countries I've visited recently outside of the US, Whatsapp seems like hands-down the most popular messaging app (whereas in the US, almost no one I know uses it unless they're in frequent contact with a non-trivial number of foreigners).

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#83
>a feature in Duo called Knock Knock which lets you see live video of your caller before you answer, giving you a sense of what they’re up to and why they want to chat

Where can I report this as a bug? That literally misses the point of "call". Call starts before it's started for a caller.

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#84
post #53

"Announces", yes; "releases", no. The Google Play Store offers only a "pre-register" button. Yet it has 4.9 stars already. Looking forward to seeing an analysis of the protocol. Does it go through Google servers, or is it really peer to peer? How does the "end to end encryption" work? How are the keys generated and exchanged? Do the servers have the keys? Are you sure?

From the post: "We’re beginning to roll out Duo for Android and iOS today, and it will be live worldwide in the next few days."

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#85

I know these will be preinstalled on Android, but many friends and family use iOS and I will feel silly asking them to install Duo and Allo. Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. Why start requiring separate apps? This is Google at its dumbest. They are squandering the small amount of momentum Hangouts has.

> Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.

Hangouts has always worked a lot better for me than Skype and Facebook video chat. Both on Android and desktop.

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#86

I know these will be preinstalled on Android, but many friends and family use iOS and I will feel silly asking them to install Duo and Allo. Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. Why start requiring separate apps? This is Google at its dumbest. They are squandering the small amount of momentum Hangouts has.

> Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. For varying values of "just fine". For me, hangouts is probably the worst performing app on mobile, desktop and tablet. It's so bad that even Skype shames it. And FaceTime...well let's not even compare.

i think it's more that skype and facetime are amazing

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#87

I know these will be preinstalled on Android, but many friends and family use iOS and I will feel silly asking them to install Duo and Allo. Hangouts is able to mix voice, video and text just fine. Why start requiring separate apps? This is Google at its dumbest. They are squandering the small amount of momentum Hangouts has.

Google's communications strategy has been bafflingly dumb for years and years now. Almost my ENTIRE social network (that was on chat; this was before every part of society was "on the Internet") used to be on Gchat. That's a massive network-effects advantage that they had ages before anyone else did (including Facebook, but Facebook's network did surpass them with the ability to find someone by their face). Almost a…

Yeah I remember early years gchat all my social network was using that for chatting, because you always had the email open anyway when on a browser and a chat right there was just too convenient.

Also, centralized chat history! Very few did that at the time and most had massive issues with unread tracking.

The moment I went on mobile and tried hangout it was dead to me. Read notification duplicates, phantom notifications for read messages, long startup times, and group everything came mich much later

Everyone jumped ship at that moment. The hangout app was THAT bad early years, and even after quite some time later real usability issues were never fixed.

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#88

Sounds like Duo has a simple user experience, which is great. But it doesn't solve the eye-contact problem with video calls today. When you look at the person on the screen whom you're talking to, that person sees you looking away, because you're not looking into the camera, which is somewhere on the edge of the screen. So you don't make eye contact with the person you're talking to. And for me, that makes video call…

Can't they just put a camera behind the screen? Been waiting for this for over a decade

You can just virtually move the camera a bit if you are using something like Kinect V2 (with a tiny bit of stereo shadowing as a result).

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#89

Sounds like Duo has a simple user experience, which is great. But it doesn't solve the eye-contact problem with video calls today. When you look at the person on the screen whom you're talking to, that person sees you looking away, because you're not looking into the camera, which is somewhere on the edge of the screen. So you don't make eye contact with the person you're talking to. And for me, that makes video call…

Can't they just put a camera behind the screen? Been waiting for this for over a decade

You can just virtually move the camera a bit if you are using something like Kinect V2 (with a tiny bit of stereo shadowing as a result).

Re: Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's communications strategy has been bafflingly dumb for years and years now. Almost my ENTIRE social network (that was on chat; this was before every part of society was "on the Internet") used to be on Gchat. That's a massive network-effects advantage that they had ages before anyone else did (including Facebook, but Facebook's network did surpass them with the ability to find someone by their face). Almost a…

Also, Google Search and Gmail were REALLY GOOD back when Google made really good products, and they both seem to be treated as sacred there. Neither has received truly radical changes to fit with Google's new and often transient business focuses. Had Google made the mistake of replacing Gmail with Inbox, Gmail would've gone the way of everything else Google's done lately. But it seems like someone rightfully has ensu…

If anything, both Google Search and Gmail have received negative changes.

I've been using DDG for years, though I'll return to Google Web search periodically (Books and Scholar I use more often). It's nagware that's begging me to make it my default browser (no, you blew through that trust relation ages ago, sweetheart), and long before then stopped providing actual usable URL links in favour of its craptacular redirects. On desktop I've got a demungifier script I can run those through, on Android, if I see those, I remember why I don't use Google Web search, abandon it, and return to DDG.

Google News, in a moment of major irony, fails to work at all on Chrome/Android.

The company lost its soul a long time ago. It's been losing its mind for some years now.

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