Why doesn’t Google Meet’s mute button sync with a Teams-certified headset?

I’ve been using Microsoft Teams for years at my previous job, and now that I’m at a new organisation running Google Meet, I have to say, it’s genuinely impressive. Which makes it stranger that when I use it with a Teams-certified Jabra headset, raising the microphone boom arm to mute doesn’t sync into the app at all. The headset thinks it’s muted. Meet doesn’t know that happened. On Teams, the same gesture, the same headset, works instantly. So what’s actually going on here?

How did Google Meet get here?

Meet’s roots go back further than most people realise. Google had a video-calling product as early as 2011 inside Google+ Hangouts, which became a standalone messaging app in 2013. In March 2017, Google split that into two enterprise-focused products — Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat — with Meet built specifically for business video calls, capped at 30 participants, aimed at the same audience Zoom and WebEx were already courting.

Then COVID hit, and Meet’s usage jumped roughly 30x between January and April 2020. Google made it free to the public that same spring, lifted the 60-minute meeting cap for unpaid accounts, and pushed out a wave of features — virtual backgrounds, background blur, hand-raising — in a short window while trying to keep the service standing under a scale nobody had planned for. The Hangouts name was dropped in early 2020, and the product was rebranded simply as Google Meet later that year. Feature and interface updates continued through 2021–2023, and Meet eventually absorbed what used to be Google Duo into one unified product.

Does Google Meet actually have a hardware certification program?

Yes — and this is the part that surprised me doing this research, because I’d assumed it didn’t. Google’s equivalent has existed since the Hangouts Meet days, roughly 2017–2019, under the name peripheral qualification rather than “certification.” Vendors submit devices, Google’s partner lab tests them for quality, reliability, and interoperability with ChromeOS and Android Open Source Project hardware, and qualified devices get automatic firmware updates for their supported lifetime.

That program has grown steadily. Logitech‘s Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini were certified for Meet in 2021, alongside the launch of a “Designed for Google Meet” peripheral tier. Neat joined as a certified hardware partner as recently as January 2026, bringing its Bar Generation 2, Bar Pro, and Pad into the qualified list. Google even has a dedicated, newly published page listing certified headsets specifically for audio quality — the same category we cover in our own piece on why the headset a company buys matters as much as the chair. So the program is real, it’s been running for years, and it’s still expanding.

So why doesn’t the mute button sync, then?

Because qualification and call control are two different things. Everything above — video bars, cameras, speakerphones, and now headset audio — is about hardware quality and interoperability with ChromeOS and AOSP. None of it is about whether your headset’s physical mute gesture talks to the Meet software running in your browser.

That second layer is where Meet is genuinely behind. Google Meet has no native Windows app. What you install is a Progressive Web App — Chrome wrapped in its own window, still running inside the browser’s sandbox, not a standalone client with deep access to your operating system. Microsoft Teams, by contrast, is a native desktop app with call control built directly into it, which is exactly why the same Jabra headset mutes instantly on Teams and does nothing on Meet — a native-versus-web-wrapper gap not unlike the one we saw Cisco spend two decades closing off before finally building native Microsoft Teams Rooms hardware.

The mute-sync behaviour that does exist for Meet doesn’t come from Google or Jabra at all — it comes from an unofficial, community-built Chrome extension using the WebHID API. It works only with Jabra devices connected by USB or the Jabra Link dongle; Bluetooth connections aren’t supported, and you have to manually grant HID permissions to the extension before it’ll talk to your headset. It’s a workaround built by a developer, not a feature shipped by either company.

Is a native Meet app ever coming — and would it fix this?

We don’t have a public statement from Google on this, so anything here is genuinely a guess rather than a confirmed plan. But the pattern is consistent: the PWA architecture is the reason there’s no built-in call-control layer, and until that changes, headset mute-sync on Meet will keep depending on third-party extensions rather than anything native. Given how long the peripheral qualification program has been running and expanding, it wouldn’t be surprising if call control eventually gets folded into it too — but that’s speculation on our part, not something Google has said. If your organisation is weighing Meet against Teams for a wider room and headset rollout, our consultation page is a good place to talk through what actually fits your platform choice.

Sources

1. Wikipedia’s history of Google Hangouts and its split into Meet and Chat
2. Overview of Meet’s March 2017 launch and its COVID-era usage growth
3. Google’s official page on the Meet hardware certification program for ChromeOS and AOSP
4. Google Workspace Updates on Logitech Rally Bar certification and the “Designed for Google Meet” program
5. Google Workspace Updates announcing Neat as a certified Meet hardware partner
6. Google’s certified headsets page for Google Meet
7. Confirmation that Google Meet has no native Windows app, only an installable PWA
8. The unofficial Chrome extension providing Jabra call-control support for Google Meet, via WebHID