Google Duo: simpler must be better

It’s  somewhat incredible how Facetime has no clear contestant in the world of mobile video calling apps in Android. We’ve got Skype and other options, of course, but none of them has conquered Android users and here we see even much more fragmentation than on the instant messaging market.

That’s what Google is trying to solve with Google Duo, which pursues something remarkable: minimalism and simplicity. The app is available starting today for Android and iOS, so we’ll see if in this world of overcomplex applications something like this really makes sense to users.

Maybe separating that from Hangouts was the right thing to do after all.

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish. The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.