If you are an Apple mobile device user (iPhone, iPad), you may have encountered problems accessing Google Meet if you have an older device. 

Google is nice enough to release Meet for all of us to use for free. Why is this important? Now there is access to a video conferencing platform that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology for captioning without relying on add-ons. While not as full-featured as Zoom, it is simple to use. Yea, to Google for their efforts in making the world a little more accessible for people with hearing loss. Boo to Apple for limiting access to this technology to mobile devices with iOS 12.0 and newer. 

My neighbor was having problems connecting her iPad to a Meet invitation sent to her by her daughter-in-law. I figured I might be able to duplicate her issue and solve her problem. I have an iPad (Gen 4) with an iOS of 10.3.4. I created a Meet on my PC laptop and found out that:

1. I knew there was a reason I was not too fond of Apple products



2. the iPad will not connect to Meet through the browser - it referred me to the App Store to download the Google Meet app



3. the Google Meet app requires iOS 12 or newer



4. you cannot update 4th generation iPads to iOS 12 or newer

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. After spending hundreds of dollars on the project, I found out at the completion that access is limited to - guess what - mobile devices with iOS 12 or newer. Everything worked fine throughout the development process until it went live on the server.  While testing locally, access wasn't an issue, only when the software was uploaded to its server. It was something I had never thought of doing, never done anything like it, thought it would be useful when completed, and learned a lot of lessons from that project. 

If you know this to be untrue, please post the workaround here.

Take care and stay safe
--  
Alan Katsura
Moderator HLAA Tech Group