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I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. It's a great cross-platform video chat app. I especially like the feature where you can see the other party
by putlake 10y ago
I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. It's a great cross-platform video chat app. I especially like the feature where you can see the other party before you answer their call. I have taken calls because of that feature that I otherwise wouldn't have.
It's better than FaceTime because it works on Android. It's better than Skype and Google Hangouts because your cellphone number is your identity; you don't have to log in with any usernames or passwords. Extremely low friction.
- arihant 10y agoI was waiting for Duo and didn't even know it launched. Maybe more marketing is required.
- piyush_soni 10y agoI'll use everything Google, but Duo has been the most stupid video chat app I've ever used. That's because in countries where the common household internet is still not that fast, it 'aggressively' pauses (completely removes) the video for long intervals in every few minutes citing slow connection. That's a frustrating experience. I generally get around 10-12 Mbps speed (which is on the higher side in India), and my family in another city have a 4 Mbps connection - it still pauses the video regularly when we talk - and eventually we switch to skype because it at least shows something, even if pixelated. I'm as disappointed by this 'feature' as excited I was before trying Duo.
- amaks 10y agoWhat's the latency of your connection? You can get 4 Mbps throughput (which is not a lot by itself, BTW), but the latency may be too high for a video chat.
- AstralStorm 10y agoPeople can live with a few seconds of latency on GSM. Chat is mostly half-duplex. It is usually lack of bandwidth or major packet loss that cause trouble.
- piyush_soni 10y agoYes, 4Mbps is not a lot, but since Skype shows something, Duo is effectively worse for me. I didn't measure the latency of my parents' connection. Will have to do it next time I'm there.
- spacehunt 10y agoWhat's the uplink speed on the other end (presumably 4Mbps is downlink)? That would be a more limiting factor in the quality of the video you see on your end. But then I recall we had working video chat a decade ago with only a few hundred Kbps...
- spdionis 10y ago> But then I recall we had working video chat a decade ago with only a few hundred Kbps... This! Even in appear.in, which is one of the most stable, I encounter connection problems almost daily. Is it because all these new apps have to go through the browser stack?
- AstralStorm 10y agoNo, WebRTC and codecs do support low bitrates. Someone got lazy coding the client.
- spdionis 10y agoGiven that I don't know anything about this domain, in my experience "supports" doesn't necessarily mean "supports well" or "there is no technical reason the browser stack slows this down, it's only the client's fault" or "would have been much easier to support in another stack without going through all this shit". So I'm still not convinced.
- 77ko 10y agoI'm having the same issue with Duo. it pauses the video frequently. I switched back to FB Messenger, which just works without pausing video. Google had said something about Google Duo being bandwidth friendly and good for slow connections but FB Messenger is miles ahead, at least in my usage. Which left me quite disappointed with Duo, as I like the idea of using Duo over FB.
- Yhippa 10y agoIt would be cool if you could see anybody who's calling you before you answer. It would be a lot easier to see if it's a call you should take or not.
- lqdc13 10y agoI would be surprised if it became popular. Perhaps it doesn't have the features of Hangouts while it does have the requirement that you install another app and the stigma of it being a Google product (i.e. they collect all your info). Also lacks messaging capabilities. It can only be used for very short 1 on 1 phone calls since I can't imagine video chatting for a long time from a phone. Also it can't be used with a desktop. Otherwise, Skype and Hangouts are way better plus any decent WebRTC P2P chat like www.appear.in
- hasenj 10y agoI've never even heard of it before! Sounds interesting!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lazzlazzlazz 10y agoFacebook Messenger has all of those advantages and even more, since your name is your identity and not something that requires exchange like a phone number. I suspect the "video preview" feature will come soon to Facebook Messenger, which has been developing quickly.
- eggie 10y agoYes, but you have to have a facebook account...
- craigcabrey 10y agoYou haven't needed a full FB account to use Messenger for over a year now [0]. [0]: http://lifehacker.com/you-can-now-use-facebook-messenger-without-a-facebook-a-1713715943 http://lifehacker.com/you-can-now-use-facebook-messenger-wit...
- rtpg 10y agoI think there are other reasons, but I really dislike using my phone number as an ID. Phone numbers are much harder to change , so if some annoying person gets a hold of it suddenly they can harass me across networks. This is a thing that actually happens! A big reason why I don't like telegram (even if everything else is awesome). I'm cool with my account being linked to a phone number, but I'd rather avoid giving the phone number to people I want to talk to (instead handing out a network-specific username)
- Nullabillity 10y agoIIRC, Telegram allows you to set a username and give that out instead.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- largote 10y agoBut you can still be nagged if someone finds your phone number.
- newman314 10y ago+1 I suddenly got hit with a flurry of spam calls today which furthers my distaste for giving out a phone number. If only giving out free limited use phone numbers was a thing.
- mullsork 10y agoEven worse is when you loose your phone. I just lost mine (still hoping some nice Berliner turned it into the lost and found) and I guess I've gone and lost all my whatsapp history + contacts there.
- spacehunt 10y agoI think Whatsapp backs up its chat history to Google Drive / iCloud. For contacts it just uses the system address book.
- partiallypro 10y ago> I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. The market is incredibly saturated in the chat space. Google keeps creating new things with new names (which they will eventually kill off) and the rest of the market is just completely saturated. WeChat, WhatsApp, Skype, FaceTime, Messenger, SnapChat, HangOuts; and that's the short list. It's getting out of hand. The chat model is incredibly difficult to monetize too. None that don't have other vertical product lines have shown an ability to properly monetize in a way to turn a profit. Eventually that will matter, but for now money grows on trees in the Valley so no one cares. I almost feel like the sort of joke that "we can't just keep selling each other insurance" as a criticism of the of banking sector could easily be rewritten with chat apps and the Valley.
- bemmu 10y agoStickers? At least LINE is doing something like $268M in Sticker sales with 218M active users: http://qz.com/704768/line-sold-268-million-worth-of-stickers-last-year-amid-asias-messaging-boom/ http://qz.com/704768/line-sold-268-million-worth-of-stickers...
- Freak_NL 10y agoI find it hard to find any explanation for this behaviour that fits except for the rather bleak suspicion that right now all that matters is gaining market share and locking people into your walled garden. Perhaps they are getting some return on investment now by creating ever more detailed advertising profiles on their users, but that doesn't seem sustainable — it strikes me as rather bubblish. I wonder what the long term vision is. More data harvesting for advertising? Become the de facto platform for services offered through your chat network? The latter reminds of how every company needed a presence in Second Life to engage with customers and leads…
- amaks 10y agoI guess it'll depend on the emerging markets with slow(er) connections when Duo really shines (presumably it can work on 3G and fallback to audio only on even slower connections).
- atdt 10y agoI live in New York City and there are very few places outside the home where you can hold up your phone like a pocket mirror and speak into it without looking like an asshole.
- sigmar 10y agoI've seen tons of people video chatting throughout public spaces in NYC, usually with headphones on so they can hear the other person. None of those people looked "like an asshole"
- flukus 10y agoI always think they're assholes, annoying me with their boring conversations. At least put the speakerphone on so we can hear both sides of the conversation.
- obmelvin 10y agoHow is it any different from talking on the phone? Something that probably millions do daily in NYC.
- flukus 10y agoIt isn't. I think your an asshole if you use your phone on public transport.
- netrus 10y agoHow is it different from having a conversation with the person next to you? Wait, are those assholes too? Or just when you can understand one of them, but not the other? Oh the misanthropy ...
- flukus 10y agoThe phone is generally a lot louder, and filled with a lot more "SORRY I MISSED THAT, I'M GOING THROUGH A TUNNEL".
- hkmurakami 10y agoI was introduced to Duo by a family friend who is 70. He uses it to talk to his grandchlidren. He's an Android user (refuses to use iPhone since he used to sell to Apple back in the 80's and has never been a fan of their business practices); other family members use iOS. His extended family lives in the South. He lives in California. Duo brought their family closer as they talk to each other during the first days of their grandchildren's school days. I expect similar use cases to exist around the country. The phone number as ID is huge for the non superuser crowd. This is part of the reason why LINE took off in Japan.
- 77ko 10y agoGoogle is treating video calling as it's own seperate thing. I much prefer Facebook Messenger where its about the contact, and u call/msg/video them and its all there in one stream. Google's disjointed approach to messaging/calling doesn't make sense to me or my non-techie friends.
- jon-wood 10y agoThe thing that irritates me about this is Hangouts could already do exactly that, long before Messenger could, and did it really well. It's by far my preferred messaging app but no one but my wife actually uses it, so I'm stuck using Messenger instead.
- wutbrodo 10y agoI'm in roughly the same position, and the absolutely frustrating thing is that they had (on gchat) the largest chat network at precisely the point where chat-over-IP started to skyrocket in usage. But then Google spent a year (apparently) willfully chasing away users from their communications products through obscenely incompetent product decisions over the next decade. I spent almost half a decade at Google, and I _know_ that their product people are fairly competent, but the company is so badly run on the product side (in terms of incentives, etc) that product at Google has the emergent property of being extremely, extremely bad at what they do.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoWhat would be better if to have a client that keeps all of a contacted communiqués together - like messenger but with that person's direct tweets to you, and your hangout chats, and your live.com emails, ... that to me is the holy grail of messaging.
- mkhpalm 10y agoI know, but nobody else will ever know because Google keeps losing all of its users to itself. Everybody I know got frustrated and moved on to things that just work... like ancient SMS, FaceTime, Facebook, etc. If you say "google" anything to them they just say; too complicated, doesn't work, UX sucks, etc. I think in reference to the UX people are speaking to chrome plugins.
- antirez 10y agoI tried it a few days ago with a bad connection and the video quality was outstanding. I'm sold.
- wutbrodo 10y ago> I'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular. It's a great cross-platform video chat app. For apps that rely on network effects, pure feature competition isn't the only (or sadly, even the most) relevant factor. I commented on this in the Duo announcement thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12295847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12295847), but the gist was something like: With GChat, they squandered a massive, decade-early networks effect advantage with ten years of inexplicably idiotic product decisions, rebranding, failure to adequately replace deprecated products, etc. I actually generally consider them to have the absolute best products in terms of feature quality, far more often than not; Yet at this point, I can't imagine why anyone would see a Google product that relies on network effects at all and not run as far away as fast as possible.
- sidcool 10y agoI agree, Duo is great. Even at low bandwidth
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>i'm surprised Google Duo hasn't become more popular.// I'm semi-actively looking for alternatives to Skype and hadn't heard of Duo. I've an Android phone, they jam in so much junk I don't need, surprised not have had a notification of a Google communication app. Personally I feel the space needs to be democratised badly. We need some way to take control of contacts lists so they can be locally (to the user) synced outside of any app and have a protocol like XMPP that's common across carriers so that [video] chat clients become like PSTN telephones.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoAh, no desktop client ... so not proper cross-platform.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]