Allo was basically an early (and of course much worse) version of what ChatGPT is now, it was a really cool chat bot, but most of the stuff was dumbed down totally and taken out by legal.

What you saw was not the original project that the engineers were trying to launch.

Allo was instant messaging with users identified by phone numbers rather than accounts. That was something a lot of consumers clearly found compelling (Whatsapp, iMessage), Google had no product for, and would not have been something that could be retrofit as a feature in their existing chat app.

Duo was two person video calls optimized for mobile phones, and allowing calling via phone number. Basically Facetime and Whatsapp. Again, a hugely popular product category that they did not have a product in, and with a paradigm that was not compatible with their existing video call app.

That's not to say these were good ideas, or that the projects were well executed. They were me-too copies of other companies' products, and possibly without enough understanding of what made those products popular. But the "duplicates" criticism is just lazy, and makes it seem that you're just parroting memes and did not know anything about the apps other than their names.

Their stupid names and simultaneous introduction killed them.

This is classic Google culture where Director A and B decide to get into the same category of product and refuse to work together. Unfortunately there is no adult in the room to put them in the place.

Tbf every company suffers from this. Look at multi tasking on iPad as an example. Classic Jobs might have been the only one who could cut this out

but surely it would have been easier to add "call contact" to Hangout/Meetings than create a separate app for the specific feature? It's not like you have separate contact lists, and I mean, that is how it works now[0].

So, no I don't think this is a lazy criticism, the fact that a new app was created instead of adding a feature to something that already existed is a managerial mistake because it creates extra confusion for users weakening the existing products[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVFda0I8uW0&t=1s

[1] Sometimes it makes sense to extract a smaller app from a big one, but this is not the case.