Breakout rooms and live streams with recording are on the list.
Google’s communication apps always feel like they’re in flux: merging, splitting off, and trading features back-and-forth. A few years back rumors raised the idea of Google merging Duo with Meet but that never ended up happening. However, Google did shift a lot of its focus towards the Meet app, giving it loads of new features and updates over time. Duo, on the other hand, hasn’t received nearly as much attention. In spite of that, the app just recently managed to achieve the milestone of surpassing 5 billion installs on the Play Store. Now we’re finally learning about some new functionality that looks like it’s coming to Duo, as Google’s spotted working on bringing over some Meet features.
Duo recently got updated to version 159.0.425779378 and the folks over at XDA Developers discovered some interesting new strings in their teardown. Firstly, there are some lines of code within the APK hinting at the addition of breakout rooms, so participants of a video chat could be divided into smaller groups, making it easier to interact with everyone. Since Google Duo allows up to 32 people to join a group video call, this sounds like it could be pretty useful.
For an update-starved service like Duo, that would be plenty interesting on its own, but it looks like there’s even more new stuff in development. Additional text strings in this latest release make reference to support for live streaming and the ability to record meetings.
Those include messages like “Live stream will start soon,” and “This meeting is being streamed and recorded.” All this is still in development right now, so you won’t see anything new even after updating to the latest version. There’s also the possibility that these features may not actually end going live in the Duo app (or maybe not in the way we’re expecting). We’ll be keeping an eye on future updates to see if any further signs of progress emerge.
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