It isn’t meant to supplant Google Messenger, either. Google isn’t positioning Duo as a replacement for its long-in-development Hangouts platform, which also supports video chatting. But it’s a personal touch that makes conversations with Duo easier, and for a category of apps that’s infamous for spotty connections and shoddy audio, that’s significant. It won’t show callers that you’ve blocked, either, and it doesn’t work on iOS - When you receive a call on an iPhone, you have to unlock your phone and tap a notification to answer. Knock Knock can be toggled off, of course, and you’re only able to see chat partners you’ve added to your contact list - presumably to ensure unfamiliar faces don’t appear onscreen unexpectedly. Best buddy dialing in from a library? Texting might be more conducive to conversation. Estranged boyfriend calling incessantly? Best not to answer. It’s surprisingly useful - you’re able to quickly see which of your friends wants to chat, of course, but also make a judgment call about whether or not to answer. One, playfully dubbed Knock Knock, lets you view a friend’s stream before you answer the call. And the features that are present are supplementary. The lack of features work to its benefit: calls just work. We experienced only a momentary stutter when we disabled Wi-Fi in favor of 4G. In our tests, quality was at least on par with Skype and FaceTime - both of which took a few milliseconds longer than Duo to connect our voice calls.ĭuo’s intuitiveness puts it heads and shoulders above the competition. We could see our chat partners perfectly clearly and without interruption. In our time with Duo, it all worked flawlessly - and almost instantaneously. It can even pull a magic trick: seamless video chat hand-off between Wi-Fi and cellular connections. It features adaptive streaming that automatically adjusts stream quality on the fly, as needed. It provides native support for video chatting without the need for plugins or third-party applications, so performance is consistent across platforms. That’s thanks in part to the technical foundation on which Duo is built: WebRTC, or Web real-time communication. In our tests, Duo chats went off without a hitch. Those who don’t aren’t on Duo will receive a text message invitation to join, instead. Select one, and, assuming they’ve confirmed their number via Duo, they’ll receive a call almost immediately. Tap a big, circular, stylized button labeled “Video call” and you’re confronted with a list of contacts. After you’ve copied said code and subsequently entered it, you’re good to go - there aren’t any email confirmation messages to juggle, no passwords to remember, and there’s no need to associate your Facebook or Google credentials with your account. You enter your phone number, and then wait for Google to text you a verification code. Setup is perhaps the quickest of any chat app we’ve used. It quickly becomes apparent that with Duo, Google wanted to do one thing - video - exceptionally well. The app evokes Apple’s FaceTime in its simplicity: install it, launch it, and you’ll find yourself confronted with little else but a welcome screen. Rather than adopt self-destructing video messaging made popular by Snapchat, Instagram, and others, Google has opted to hark back to a mobile era when real-time video was the bee’s knees of mobile. IOS 17.2 just arrived - here’s what’s new in the big iPhone updateįirst things first: Duo isn’t like Snapchat. The best phones in 2023: our 15 favorite smartphones right now The best small phones in 2023: the 6 best ones you can buy
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