Google Is Shutting Down Its Allo Messaging App, Says Report (9to5google.com) 62
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.
Guess it is time... (Score:2)
...to say Au Revoir to Allo.
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In a gadda da vida, baby!
Allo? (Score:1)
Never heard of it. Did anyone?
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I assume that's part of the problem.
Google isn't above Microsoft-like mee-too-ism trying to clone (or buy) into the competition of a new, hit app.
Re:Allo? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Never heard of it either.
Re: Allo? (Score:1)
I do not care about Allo. If they shut down Hangouts and have no replacement VOIP app tied to Google Voice, that I will miss.
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It was one of about eighty Google chat apps they were peddling, each obsoleting the others with circular dependencies.
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I think it was the one that debuted as an Android exclusive, with the ability to type directly to the Google Assistant? Honestly, I'm not sure. I only stopped using Google Talk last year, just in time to have to leave Google Hangouts because it was shutting down too, just in time to have to migrate away from Google Chat because my company was switching to Slack to get away from all of that nonsense.
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Never heard of it. Did anyone?
Yesh it was supposed to be the text paring with Duo. Allo and Duo were supposed to replace hangouts. Which was mostly working fine the way it was. I miss being able to watch YouTube videos as a group on Hangouts that was a great feature.
Could Google just fucking tell me (Score:2, Funny)
What app they want me to use. New announcement each week should be enough.
Re:Could Google just fucking tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
for an additional $10,000,000.... (Score:1)
....I'd be happy to offer my Android development services to remove the "Start Video Call" button from being placed directly in the ActionBar, which at least one user in any 50+ person chat will accidentally tap at least once per day. $10M may seem like a lot of money to simply add the text 'showAsAction="never"' to a menu XML file, but rest assured the resulting goodwill toward your company will be of significantly greater value.
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The only real flaw in Hangouts is that it lacks end to end encryption, but otherwise it's by far and away the best option available.
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The only thing in your rant that I disagree with is:
Chat, which is a clone of Hangouts but with more bullshit and less functionality
Chat actually has more functionality. It's taken over as the messaging tool of choice inside Google because it's better. Among other things you can actually send files other than images to people through it. Very convenient when you're talking about some file to just be able to include it in the conversation. The chat room functionality is a little better, too, and the web UI is better if you're someone (like me) who frequently has a dozen conversations o
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Chat has more functionality than Hangouts in the same way Slack has more functionality than IRC.
Fuck Chat.
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Chat has more functionality than Hangouts in the same way Slack has more functionality than IRC.
I can't think of a single thing Hangouts does that Chat doesn't, and several things that Chat does that Hangouts doesn't. I don't think you know what you're talking about.
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SMS / Hangouts unification before they killed it off, then SMS integration (as separate chats) before they killed that off too (it was fairly recently that they forced people on the last good version of Hangouts to switch to the new, gimped Hangouts). Old Hangouts also worked with latitude very well. Now Latitude is dead, and partially baked into Maps, but you HAVE to enable location history if you want to see where your friends/family are on the map now.
You don't know what you're talking about. Google h
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Google confused! Such smart folks one would think. (Score:2)
Google should just buy Viber & Line messaging services. They do have the money. After the purchase, they should migrate all of them to Telegram's protocols.
With this action, Google will have over 1 billion users fast.
They can then push advertisements to make serious cash.
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G keeps shutting down services. (Score:2)
can we have gchat back now? (Score:2)
With such a huge install base with the original Gchat, it takes a certain knack to so drop the ball continually on messaging.
Google, how about just go all in on hagnouts or bring back Gchat?
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Wasn't hangouts a direct Gchat replacement at the beginning?
Goodbye Allo (Score:2)
EOM
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You say "Yes", I say "No".
You say "Stop" and I say "Go, go, go".
Oh no.
You say "Goodbye" and I say "Allo, allo, allo".
I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Allo, allo, allo".
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say allo.
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Find a way for people to connect for "free" and a brand will grow.
Why in 2018 is text, mic and something like HD and lower resolution webcam so difficult to code fo the web?
So one person on the web can "message" another person on the web, secure in a browser?
Its not like code has to be kept over decades of version drift on OS like Mac, Windows, Linux.
Google Allo? (Score:3)
Still don't know why they deprecated Hangouts (Score:2)
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Because somebody wanted to get promoted.
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Doesn't Hangouts still do all that stuff? I have never bothered to use Allo and I use Hangouts for SMS on my Android phone, and to make calls via Google Voice — which is the only phone I've got that works where I live. I am on Exede Satellite. It looks like all the same stuff I've been using is still in Hangouts, and not deprecated at all. The only thing that isn't in there is video calls, which I never use, never have used, and probably never will use.
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Once Hangouts is gone, I doubt many people will switch to a Google alternative.
Nobody was anyway, so I guess nothing has changed. I will however continue to use whatever lets me make google voice calls until they find a way to shut that down, too.
Never heard of it (Score:2)
Was it any good?
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Not really, and I used it pretty regularly. It had some predictive AI built in, but it was just another messaging app using whatever protocol.
All people want is something that is:
1) Secure
2) Has a first-class web client
3) Falls back to SMS
Back to SMS (Score:2)