This isn't an area where simplicity wins. Zoom is targeted more towards professional use whereas Meet is more for casual or social use. It doesn't really support multiple displays, like I can't watch screen sharing on one display while moving the chat and video windows off to another display. Scaling options for screen sharing are inadequate and it doesn't even support real full screen display. Meet lacks advanced audio options that make it unusable for things like music lessons. Zoom has more third party integrations available.
I think because Meet is fully browser based, some of the features like sharing audio with screen are only available via chrome or chromium based browsers -- definitely not on Firefox in my own testing. I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's kind of sad.
Yeah downloading an app for video calls feels very skype. And it's a non-starter for me personally given Zoom's history of lying about privacy and encryption.
That's fair. Everyone comes to these sorts of positions with a stack of values[1]. How that stack is ordered often determines one's choices.
One of the interesting things for me from a technological perspective is whether or not we're converging on what the ideal set of features for a "video phone" would be. If there was a broad enough consensus on the core feature set I would hope an 'appliance' version would be available which would eliminate needing to use a general purpose processor (and all the risks that entails) for this sort of meeting.
[1] From your response I infer that you value "no native code" and "sandboxed javascript" highly which guides you to the choice to use Meet, vs someone who might stack "User Experience" more highly than those two and end up at a different choice.
I think more critically it doesn't support remote control. I have no idea how they have missed that critical feature. Do people really enjoy "now scroll down, no a bit more... back a bit... there! stop!"??
