While Google Duo is gone, its icon makes a surprising return

Well, the latest Google news is quite amusing, to say the least. Google, with a new update, has brought back the Google Duo’s iconic blue icon, giving users another way to enjoy the Meet-Duo experience on Android. Due to this, there are now two ways to open the same application.

Google scrapped Duo and deemed Meet as the lone survivor. However, since Google Duo was way more popular as compared to the Google Meet app (the number of installs, which is 5 billion to 500 million in favor of Google Duo), it is the one that you can still find on people’s phones. With an update, Google revamped the Duo homescreen with features from both services. Then in August, Google pushed another update (172) that replaced the Google Duo blue icon with the four-colored Meet icon.

Google is yet to update the Google Duo Play Store listing with the new branding

And when people opened the application, Google Duo disappeared from their launcher. Fast forward to now, with the update (173), the Google Duo icon is back, which was thought to be most probably a bug. But there is a good reason for its comeback. According to a response by Google to 9To5Google, Google has intentionally brought back the Google Duo blue icon with the latest update on Android.

This is because the newly added Google Duo icon will allow users to search/type the word “Duo” to launch the application since it is the app that is used more than Meet. You will have both the Google Duo and Meet logos on your launcher. Besides, when you open both, you will get the unified Meet-Duo experience. The introduction of the Google Meet icon is to facilitate the app search for users.