Google has a new video phone app called "Duo". With Duo, making a video call is as easy as making a regular phone call. It's available for Android and Apple phones.

I installed this yesterday on my Android phone. Then I went to my wife's iPad to install it there but couldn't find it in the app store. My wife's iPad doesn't have a phone number.

It seems to me that being able to connect to both android and iOS would be a huge advantage. Hopefully, it can be used on an iPad without a phone number.

Given that you call a phone number, I doubt it will work on a tablet. However, you should be able to use Hangouts on any phone, tablet or computer that can run it.

In theory, it could work with an VoIP phone number over wi-fi. Whether it actually works in that scenario is another issue. If it is not available for tablets, it probably does not.

^^^^
What would be nice is a universal video call app. Right now, we have multiple, incompatible systems, such as Hangouts, Duo, Skype etc., where users of one can't connect with users of another. When we make phone calls, we don't worry who the phone company is, or send emails, we don't worry about the ISP or email app. Perhaps with the move to WebRTC, we'll eventually see this happen. It would also be nice to see Hangouts & Duo rolled into one app, so that it doesn't matter whether the other person has a phone or not when you try to contact them.

Facebook messenger ugggh. Has video calling that is cross platform compatible..

Sent from my SM-N920W8 using Tapatalk

I find Google's choice to make Allo/Duo bizarre. Whenever you start a new IM system, you're starting from zero users, so the network effect is working against you. And, to make matters worse, Google's new system doesn't work on devices that don't have a phone number (!), and has fewer features than their existing IM system (Hangouts) that does voice and video calls all in one app, already has a user base and works on a PC/Mac/tablet.

This makes me seriously question the management decisions at Google, and I suspect that these new apps won't ever challenge Facebook Messenger or the other "big" IM/voice/video systems (e.g. Skype, Snapchat, etc). I suspect they won't even exceed their existing Hangouts user base.

Fail.

There are two things working against standards in some market segments. One is that some de facto standards exist but they are copyrighted and the owners refuse to license them. Any attempt to clone the standard or its interface often results in a gigantic lawsuit. (See Oracle vs Google re the Java interface.) The other is that large companies develop such a huge corporate ego that they think they can ignore standards due to market share. MS was often guilty of this in days past. Google and Apple are the new heirs apparent of this phenomena. Standards eventually win out but only after widespread acceptance of standardized products in a commodity marketplace or after governments step in to regulate the market.

I tried it with a friend this morning. It seems to work well. Just touch the other person's contact and the call goes through.

What was really impressive is that it was able to handle a handoff from Wi-Fi to cellular quite gracefully. It was an unintentional test when a friend called me just as I was leaving the house, but after a brief moment of garbled audio and a few dropped frames, it picked up once cellular data was connected.

Sent from my SM-N930W8 using Tapatalk

^^^^
The reason for that is QUIC is based on UDP. Unlike TCP, each packet is independent, and it doesn't matter that the source or destination addresses are. The data is managed by upper layer software. I demonstrated the same thing years ago, with openVPN. I could switch from one WiFi connection to another, without dropping the tunnel.

I installed duo on my wife's iPad. It asked for a phone number so I used my wife's android phone's number. Google sent a text with an activation code to her phone. I inserted the code into her iPad and duo worked fine on her ipad.

She can call out with duo from her contact list. I'm not sure what will happen if I called her iPad with the phone number from her phone. I'm going to try it one of these days. Given it was activated with her number, I wouldn't be too surprised if it works. After all it's not using the voice network at all - just wifi or data so the phone number is nothing more than an identifier.

I had installed this app about two months ago. I thought that being a google app it will get huge popularity. But found very few of my friends are using this one. So, I uninstalled this app.

I have been using this App for more than two months. It is working perfectly for me. The interface is user friendly and easy to use. I am happy with its performance.

I haven't found this app that much effective as Google's other app works. Recently, uninstalled it.