Using Google Meet on Your iPad for Remote Work (Formerly Google Duo)

If you came here looking for Duo, the short answer is that it is gone. Google spent two years merging Duo into Google Meet, and the final legacy Duo calling features were removed in early 2026. There is no separate Duo app to download anymore, and the old standalone calling experience, along with its dedicated call history and settings, has been retired. Users who wanted to keep their old call history had to export it before the cutoff; that migration window has now closed. If you search the App Store for Duo, you will simply land on Google Meet.

Setting Meet up on an iPad is quick. Install Google Meet from the App Store, sign in with the Google account you use for work, and grant camera and microphone access when prompted. We recommend allowing the app to ring even when it is closed, otherwise you will miss calls that arrive while you are in another app. There is no separate account to create, so if you already use Gmail or Google Workspace you are ready in a couple of minutes.

One setup step is worth doing before your first call. By default, the new Meet calling experience makes you reachable at your email address, which means people who are not in your contacts can call you. If you would rather limit that, open Settings, go to General, and turn on "Only contacts can call me." This setting syncs with your Google contacts and is a sensible privacy default for anyone doing remote work from a personal account. On a shared family iPad, also remember that Meet signs in one account at a time, so sign out at the end of your day to avoid work calls ringing on someone else's lap.

Plenty of video apps pile on effects nobody uses. The Meet features we leaned on for real work were the practical ones:

• Live captions. Captions appear in real time and were accurate enough to follow a fast talker, which helps in noisy home settings. If you are on an eligible Google Workspace plan, Meet can also show translated captions across 70 or more languages, useful for calls with overseas colleagues. Translated captions are not part of the free personal tier and are still rolling out, so check whether your plan includes them.
• In-call chat. A text panel during the call lets you drop a link, a name, or a correction without interrupting whoever is talking.
• Video lighting adjustment and Portrait touch up. These replaced the old Duo low light mode. The iPad camera struggles in dim rooms, and the lighting adjustment brightened our face enough to look present rather than like a shadow.
• Stackable effects. You can combine background blur or a replacement background with the touch up, which is handy when your real background is a cluttered kitchen.
• Cloud encryption. Meet calls are encrypted in transit, which is the baseline you want for work conversations.

Call quality was the real surprise. On a solid Wi-Fi connection, video stayed sharp and audio rarely dropped, even on the older iPad mini we tested as a worst case.

This is the part many guides skip, and it matters for remote work. With a personal Google account, Meet supports group calls of up to 100 participants, which is comfortably more than most small teams need, and the iPad screen makes the grid genuinely readable in a way a phone cannot. The catch is time. Free group calls with three or more participants are capped at 60 minutes. You get a warning at around the 55-minute mark, and after the cutoff everyone has to rejoin with the same link for another 60 minutes.

One-to-one calls do not have that 60-minute ceiling on the free tier, so a long pairing session or a single client check-in is fine. If your team regularly runs hour-plus group meetings, you will either be rejoining repeatedly or moving to a paid Google Workspace plan, which lifts the group time limit. Build that around your schedule before a meeting rather than discovering it at minute 59.

A few habits made the iPad a far better calling device than it is out of the box. Prop it up. A cheap folio stand or a kickstand case changes everything, because holding an iPad at face height for a thirty minute meeting is genuinely tiring. We also paired AirPods, which pushed both the microphone and speaker quality well past the built-in hardware and cut out keyboard clatter on the other end.

If you bounce between a call and a document, Split View lets you keep Meet pinned to one side while you read notes on the other. It is not as roomy as a laptop, but for glancing at an agenda it works. We also got in the habit of plugging in for anything over twenty minutes, since sustained video calling drains the battery faster than almost any other task. Last, set your iPad to Do Not Disturb during calls so a stray notification banner does not slide over a face mid sentence.

Honesty time. There are real limits, and they matter depending on your job. The biggest one for us was screen sharing. On iPadOS, Meet shares your entire screen as a broadcast rather than letting you pick a single window or tab the way the desktop version does, so your whole display goes out, notifications included. Turn on Do Not Disturb and close anything private before you start. For demoing one app that is fine, but for anything sensitive it is clumsy.

iPadOS multitasking can also get in the way. If you swipe away to grab a file, your video can pause for the other side, which looks like you have frozen. There is no scheduling built into the iPad app tied to a desktop calendar view either, so you tend to jump back to Google Calendar to set meetings up. And a few advanced features, like breakout rooms, are limited to paid Google Workspace plans. For casual and small team calling none of this is a dealbreaker, but anyone running long webinars will feel the ceiling, especially alongside the 60-minute free group limit above.

Google Meet is a strong default, especially if your contacts already live in Google. But it is not the only good option on an iPad, and the right pick depends on who you call and why.

If your team lives in Microsoft tools, Microsoft Teams is the natural choice. Note that Skype was retired in May 2025 and its users were moved to Teams, so Teams is now Microsoft's single calling and chat app. Microsoft Teams (Free) is available on the App Store for iPad and covers meetings, chat, and calls without a paid plan. For Apple-only teams, FaceTime is hard to beat for raw video quality and simple setup, and it now lets people on other platforms join through a shared link, though the smoothest experience is still device to device on Apple hardware. If your remote work leans more on text and channels than on face to face, a dedicated messaging app may serve you better than any video tool. For a broader rundown of what we recommend across communication and social apps, browse our Social and Dating hub, or see the full best social and dating apps for iPad guide. The short version: keep Meet for quick personal and small team calls, and reach for a heavier tool only when single-window screen sharing, scheduling, or long uncapped group meetings become central to your day.