What happened to Google Duo
If you have looked for the Duo app lately and found Google Meet sitting where it used to be, nothing is broken on your phone. Duo was not deleted so much as renamed out of existence, in stages, over about four years. Here is the order it happened in.
The sequence
Google Duo began its worldwide release on 16 August 2016 as a deliberately simple one-to-one video calling app — a single button, no meeting links, no accounts to organise.
In June 2022 Google announced it would merge Duo with Google Meet. The merge began that August: the Duo mobile app was renamed Meet, and the app that had been called Meet was renamed "Google Meet (original)" and queued for removal. The web versions finished consolidating in 2024. Legacy Duo calling inside Meet was scheduled to be discontinued in January 2026.
So the icon on your phone probably did update itself into Meet rather than disappear. What is gone is the product Duo was: the one-button one-to-one thing.
Why people keep searching for it
Duo was good at exactly one job, and Meet is built for a different one. Meet is a meetings product — links, invites, calendars, participants. That is the right shape for work and the wrong shape for calling one person for four minutes.
That is the gap the searches are really about. People are not nostalgic for a logo. They want the thing where you tap once and someone is there.
What to use instead, honestly
If you are calling people you already know, the answer is boring and correct: use whatever app the person you are calling already has open. WhatsApp, FaceTime, Messenger and Meet all do a fine one-to-one video call, and the best one is the one where you do not have to talk them into installing anything.
If what you actually miss is the simplicity — one tap, one person, no setup — that is a different problem, and it is the one DuoChat is built around. You do not add anyone, you do not send a link, and you do not schedule it. You open the page and you are connected to one person. The difference is that the person is a stranger, which is either the point or a dealbreaker depending on what you came for.
One thing worth knowing before you go looking
A discontinued app name is catnip for lookalike listings. If you go searching an app store for something called "Duo", you will find a lot of things that are not the thing you remember, some of which want more permissions than a video call needs.
A web page cannot ask for your contacts or sit in your app drawer afterwards. That is not a pitch so much as a structural fact about tabs, and it is a reasonable default when you are just poking at something to see what it is.