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As smartphones continue to outpace desktops, more and more companies are becoming likely to come up with digital products that only work on smartphones. The latest example is Google’s video chat app, Google Duo, a mobile-first, mobile-only app for Android and iOS. The one-to-one video calling app was released yesterday to give smartphone users a pleasing video calling experience like never before. In this blog, we will discuss how Google Duo is an inspiration to innovate for future product development.

How Google Duo Inspires To Innovate For Future Product Development?

Google knew very well that more and more people are increasingly using smartphones not only to surf the internet, but to make video calls as well. This encouraged the search engine giant to transcend the boundaries of Google Hangouts, a unified communications service that allows members to initiate and participate in text, voice or video chats.

Continuing only with Hangouts could have led Google to lose a major chunk of video-chat market. For a simple reason, Hangouts is highly focussed on desktop users, and does not work very well on smartphones either. On the other hand, Google Duo is simple, takes the complexity of video calling out of smartphones and offers more exciting video-chat features to smartphone users than Hangouts.

I believe it makes enough sense for Google to try out hands in a video-chat app that specifically targets the  huge market of smartphone users. Read the blog further to  gain insight into what exciting features Google Duo has to offer to smartphone users.

An important point to note here is that Google Duo does not completely replace Hangouts. Hangouts will continue to serve enterprise users and be more integrated with Google Apps suite, says Vice President of Google's communications division, Nick Fox. He adds,  “Google Hangouts will still be available for consumers, of course, but those users won't be the focus of future product development.”

Google has divided its target audience into three categories: Text messages, video chat and enterprise. For enterprise, Google offers Hangouts; video chat, Google Duo; and text messages,  Allo. Google Duo is a great source of inspiration for many other companies to innovate their future products based on their target audience. Google at least showed that through its latest video-chat venture despite many other already existing options, like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, FaceTime, Hangouts, etc.

Let’s Talk About What Google Duo Has To Offer To Smartphone Users

Now, I am unveiling what Google Duo has in store for you as a smartphone user. Currently, Google Duo is available to download for iOS and Android phones from their respective app stores. After you download the app, you need to sign up, and that’s all. Yes, with Google Duo, there are no hassles of creating accounts and maintaining friend lists. The app itself picks your phone number from your sim and sends you a confirmation text.

The app nicely ties itself to your contacts list and your phone number. Simply tap on the face of the person you want to talk to, the person answers and you have your video chat going. Although Duo is simple to use, you must not mistake it for desktops. Trust me, it won’t work. Secondly, it offers no support for conference calls or any other feature that you may think of a video conference app.

Knock Knock: The Most Exciting Feature of Google Duo

Source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK8sQmJBp8GCxrOtXWBpyEA

Have you ever fancied receiving a call and your screen showing the live video from your caller before you even answer. Yes, but never got such a feature in any of the currently available video-chat mobile apps. No worries! Google has heard your wish. It sports a feature, called Knock Knock, that shows the live video of your caller to let you know who’s calling. So, if you call someone next time using Duo, you may try to make funny or stern faces to coax the receiver into quickly picking your call. However, Knock Knock is currently not available only on iOS. Also, iOS users need to unlock their phone before answering the call.

Users must not worry about unknown callers hijacking their screen. Duo shows the live videos of only those callers who are added in the contact list of your smartphone. So, no frustration over random people showing up. And if you don’t want someone in your contact list to show up on your screen, you can block that person. But remember, blocking that person on Duo would block them from everywhere since Duo offers no option to create its own independent friends list. If the feature is not something you actually want, you can disable it to prevent anyone from showing up on your screen.

No Call Drop Even in Low Connection Quality

As Duo is based on WebRTC and Google has worked on some extra technical underpinnings,  you will no face call drops even when the bandwidth is not high. Moreover, when you switch from WiFi to cellular, your call does not drop. Just a brief hiccup and your call remains alive.

Fox says that creating the best possible mobile experience for video chat is currently the matter of paramount importance for Google. And without a doubt, the recent release of Google Duo vouches his statement. The entire focus is on mobile, perhaps this is the reason it does not work on desktop, does not support conference call and not allows the same account to work on mobile devices.

Although the fate of Google Duo depends how user-friendly and simple people find it, the app itself is an inspiration to innovate for future product development.

What else you think impacts the future product development? Have you already downloaded Google Duo and started using it? Please share your vital experience and views in the comment box below.