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Google Is Shutting Down Its Allo Messaging App, Says Report (9to5google.com)
According to 9to5Google, citing a source familiar with the plan, Google will "soon" announce that it will be shutting down its Google Allo messaging app. "This development comes almost 8 months after Anil Sabharwal, Vice President of Chrome, Comms and Photos at Google, said that the company was 'pausing investment' in Google Allo," reports 9to5Google. It also comes less than a week after 9to5Google reported that Google will be shutting down Google Hangouts for consumers sometime in 2020. Google may delay the news about Allo due to the backlash stemming from the article about Hangouts. From the report: Lately, some of the app's remaining users have complained of bugs and broken functionality: there have been messages not being delivered, features like hearting posts randomly disappearing for some, and the latest stable version has been unable to perform Google Drive restores of chats for several weeks. Meanwhile, essentially the entire Allo team was moved to work on Android Messages and spent the last several months porting over much of Allo's features and functionality -- all leading up to the recent beginnings of evidence that the rollout of Google's RCS 'Chat' initiative is gaining traction.
Nah, they already had a messaging app. This is internal politicking spilling out into the public. Unfortunately you don't make a name for yourself maintaining and iterating on an existing product, you need to make something new. Ideally you make something new and while that is still in flight parley it into something else. Rinse. Repeat.
Hangouts was their best app, it did everything, and it could have been updated to do more / support better codecs / etc.
But they kept neutering it.
We went from Hangouts to:
Messages, for SMS
Allo, for other text chat
Duo, for video chat
Chat, which is a clone of Hangouts but with more bullshit and less functionality
Hangouts, which hasn't completely gone away because because it works, works on the web, is built into their "Google Apps for Business/Education / G Suite / Whatever New Name" thing, and is the only one people actually use
Hey Google, give me $10,000,000, a small team of code slaves, and I'll fix this all for you within a year.
Spoiler: It's "Hangouts", it supports SMS (fallback and explicit), it supports the stupid assistant but it's off by default, it supports group SMS and falls back to spamming people individually if they don't support that shit, and it supports end to end encryption (okay, okay, we'll bake in the Google spyware, put down the jumper cables).
It works on the web, including redirecting SMS to / from the web client from / to a preferred linked device. We'll update it to support new video and audio codecs too. And we'll even add in a search function so people don't have to use the awful Gmail search to find things from their chats (which only gives you results a single damned line at a time).