If you pick out a contact that hasn’t registered on Duo yet, you’ll be asked to pick a messaging app that Duo can use to send them an invitation. But Duo never bothered to let me know he was using the app. Turns out I was right, he had the app and he actually picked up my call.

I randomly picked out my friend Moses since he’s an early adopter of tech and I was wondering why he wasn’t listed as one of the few people I could chat on video with. First, I got to learn that Duo wasn’t all that accurate in showing me which one of my contacts has registered for Duo. Doing so, on my first attempt brought about a few things. Tapping the “Video call” icon will bring up one’s entire phonebook so that they can choose who they want to call. I am not sure how it will look like when every one of my contacts start trooping to the app if it manages to catch on. Since Duo is relatively new, all my contacts who are on Duo are displayed there. Below the camera viewfinder, there’s a quick contact list. Once set up, which is easy – install the app from the Play Store, launch it, key in your cellphone number, await the automatic SMS verification and get in – the first thing that one gets is their front-facing camera on the ready, prepared to “go live”. As much as the whole idea behind Hangouts was to make things like video calls easy, Duo takes that a step higher while personalising the experience.įaceTime made video calls mainstream for iPhone users, Duo has a chance to do the same for all Android users From my interaction with the app, it is not trying to be Hangouts or something.

That is also the reason why the first point of view with regards to Duo is important. By introducing Duo as a video chat app what, then, becomes of Hangouts? Remember Hangouts is the nearly all-in-one and cross-platform messaging app that Google seems to have tried so hard to push and when all efforts hit a wall, unbundled it from Google+, it’s failed social network, and now it is stripping it of features (SMS integration was recently removed from Hangouts and users were visibly frustrated) and introducing what can be viewed as duplicates. Here’s why we can’t fault that second view: because Google+ and Google Talk/Hangouts happened before.

Install duo video call