In April 2020, Google rebranded Hangouts Meet as Meet. Soon after, the company rebranded its Duo app as Meet. In order to distinguish the two Meets, Google added an (original) label to the former’s name, while it concentrated on developing the latter due to its larger user base. It’s been over two years since the Meet (original) app was released, so Google is killing it now and redirecting legacy users to install Meet.
Sadly, the older Meet app will stop working on Android phones. When users try to join calls, they see an error pushing them to download the current Meet app instead. Google also nixed the original Meet from app stores.
While the first Meet app reached 500 million users, the newer Meet surpassed 5 billion downloads. It makes sense for Google to focus on one unified video chatting solution going forward.
So if you still had the original Meet, it’s time to uninstall and switch to the fresh alternative. At least Google gave folks plenty of warning before pulling the plug for good.
