Google Play Games hits 5 billion downloads, as Google Meet reaches new milestone

Kyle Bradshaw | Aug 15 2022 - 11:15 am PT

Google’s hub for Android gamers, Google Play Games, has now been downloaded over 5 billion times from the Play Store, and Google Meet has also hit a new milestone.

Google Play Games, first launched in 2013, was intended to be a competitor to Apple’s Game Center on the iPhone, gathering your phone’s many games into one place. It also offers a few social features, introduces achievements to Android games, and offers suggestions of new titles to play.

Lately, the app is installed by default on most Android devices, a fact which no doubt contributed to Google Play Games having been installed billions of times. Over the weekend, it seems Google Play Games has hit another major milestone, with the Play Store now reporting that the app has been downloaded over 5 billion times, up from the previous estimate of over 1 billion.

In recent years, Google Play Games has begun to change the way both gamers and developers interact with it, shutting down its multiplayer server APIs. Meanwhile, last year Google unveiled a new logo for Play Games, side-by-side with the announcement of Play Games for Windows which brings Android games to Windows 10 and newer PCs.

Elsewhere, Google Meet has also achieved a new milestone in Play Store downloads. According to the app’s listing, Google Meet has now been downloaded over 500 million times, up from 100 million.

The bump in downloads comes at a complicated time for Google Meet. In the coming weeks or months, Google is set to retire that particular “Google Meet” app, and in fact the app has already been renamed to “Meet (Original)” for most.

Instead, the functionality of that video conferencing app — and even the “Google Meet” branding — has moved to the app formerly known as Google Duo. Despite that ongoing rename, the Google Play Store currently still shows the outgoing app as “Google Meet” and its successor as “Google Duo.”

By comparison, Google Duo — aka the new Google Meet — has been downloaded over 5 billion times from the Play Store. That’s 10 times as many downloads as “Meet (Original)” has now finally reached.