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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

#311

Post by brazzledazzle »

aljones wrote: post #298
deong wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they did do the work to circumvent the patent. "Patents" can't logically be the reason FaceTime isn't an open standard today. I doubt they ever were. Apple simply realized that FaceTime was an effective sales driver for iOS hardware and wanted to keep that competitive advantage more than they wanted to follow through on Jobs's promise.

The patents forced them to route through their own servers instead of peer to peer. Seems like a logical reason not to make that an open standard to me.

Couldn't they have made it an open standard and required an account with them to communicate with their users? An open standard would have resulted in cross-platform clients.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I've read that they actively shutdown or circumvent projects to create other clients. If they really didn't consider it a strategic asset to push people to iOS I doubt they'd bother with that.

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

#313

Post by simonh »

erichocean wrote: post #284
simonh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just wait until other users have figured out which ones are useful and which are a waste of time, let Google kill the ones that fail and iterate on the ones that don't until either everyone else adopts the same strategy as me or Google figures out what the heck they're doing. I'll set an alarm to remind myself to check back in 5 years.

For a self-identified "late adopter", you sure comment early on.

I've been early adopting Google products for years, many of which sadly nolonger exist. That's the problem.

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

#314

Post by aljones »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #311
aljones wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patents forced them to route through their own servers instead of peer to peer. Seems like a logical reason not to make that an open standard to me.

Couldn't they have made it an open standard and required an account with them to communicate with their users? An open standard would have resulted in cross-platform clients. Correct me if I'm wrong but I've read that they actively shutdown or circumvent projects to create other clients. If they really didn't consider it a strategic asset to push people to iOS I doubt they'd bother with that.

I think there are plausible reasons that could have changed their plans for them. Who knows if they would have actually followed through with the original plan or what their true reasons are. I don't know. That they changed their implementation to relay all video through their servers is known. They said so in court.

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

#315

Post by ehosca »

dzmien wrote: post #189

Why didn't they just update hangouts? I actually use hangouts for video calls with relative frequency, and I wish it was better adapted to changes in network speed like they say Duo is. I think it would be better if "Duo" was just integrated into hangouts as an update. I like hangouts because it allows me to use one app for voice, text and video.

because Hangouts is going away ... search the Play store for Allo ...

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

#316

Post by findjashua »

dzmien wrote: post #189

Why didn't they just update hangouts? I actually use hangouts for video calls with relative frequency, and I wish it was better adapted to changes in network speed like they say Duo is. I think it would be better if "Duo" was just integrated into hangouts as an update. I like hangouts because it allows me to use one app for voice, text and video.

They probably want to focus hangouts on enterprise and Duo on consumer market

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

#317

Post by nsgi »

lozf wrote: post #212
lazyjones wrote: post #163

Wasn't WebRTC going to solve all this (e.g. https://appr.tc )? What happened, has it become browser cruft?

WebRTC handles the actual p2p audio and video, but has no method of signaling the other party for attention to actually join the "call", -- no concept of userid, so you'd always need to send a link to your WebRTC service via another channel - SMS, WhatsApp, Email, IRC, ... or some other "new" service, that's really just a wrapper to handle the userid / notification problem, and uses WebRTC underneath.

Notifications are possible with Service Workers.

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

#318

Post by alistproducer2 »

apozem wrote: post #204
wutbrodo wrote: post #42

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…

> This is a pretty chronic Google problem that I noticed both from the inside and outside: their engineering and design talent are incredible, but the people responsible for the product and marketing side are evidently really, really bad at what they do. The people designing Google products just do not understand human interaction. Excuse the Gawker network link, but I think this reaction to a past Google keynote hit…

yep, that piece hits it right on the head.

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

#319

Post by mkhpalm »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #201
ethanbond wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it wouldn't be Google with any fewer than 4 semi-competing apps in their own portfolio.

My guess is Duo will be like Inbox competing with gmail. I am guessing here but I think Google is on to something around innovation. They are launching innovative future facing apps without the constraints of legacy systems. They will use this approach to figure out which features work and back port them into their legacy apps. Not a bad approach if it works.

I would argue that its already not working. I remember a time when everybody I knew went to google for communications services. After a few years of domination Google started competing with itself and suddenly those of us who were willing to change found ourselves alone.

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

#320

Post by BinaryIdiot »

CaptSpify wrote: post #291
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #45

I still think this is a huge mistake. It's great it's easy to use but now Google has two products that do video chat and they do not work together; why? If they eventually discontinue Hangouts then now we have to use two apps for texting and video? The past several years have shown that providing a more integrated experienced typically brings a better user experience so this just smacks as a mistake.

> providing a more integrated experienced typically brings a better user experience Has it really? One of the reasons I originally signed onto the google ecosystem, was that they had their services split. My youtube was separate from gchat, which was separate from gmail. Now I don't use almost any google products, because I don't want everything linked back to one account. Whenever they do this, google half-asses the…

> Has it really?

Absolutely and without a question. You will find exceptions here and there where the integration was done poorly or ultimately didn't make sense but the idea around providing integrated experiences is eliminating friction. Smart phones are fast but switching from one application to another is incredibly slow. Yes it's easy and yes you can download special launchers to slightly improve this but the fact remains that switching applications runs the risk of an application being unloaded from memory, it requires typically several taps and possibly yet another initialization.

But what if it works together in the same app? Take Google Maps and Waze for instance. Waze is awesome for gathering social data around traffic whereas Google Maps had some of that but not nearly at the same level of detail. Google integrated the Waze data into Google Maps so now, in the same application, you have both. No switching required. No need to run two mapping apps (because, let's face it, Waze's directions were never the greatest).

Let's go in a different direction now. Android didn't natively support finger print readers when companies, such as Samsung, started to include them. Due to the terrible integration you couldn't use finger prints so much of anything beyond unlocking your phone and even then there were several security vulnerabilities around that very point. Now that Google has included finger print reading, natively, into the platform you can use it everywhere. It's no longer a weird, separate, nebulous thing.

Maybe those examples are not the best but the point is that you must always march towards less and less friction. Once your app is fast and good enough the next step is integrations into other apps / systems to decrease the friction.

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