Hey, you. Yes, you! Come a little closer and give me all your attention. Ever felt there are just too many chatting apps online? Hah, me neither. We all need more and more chatting apps. Why? Why should we ever stop creating chatting apps? After all, they are the pinnacle of human invention.
Since the dawn of time, humanity has had just one question. “How to make a chatting app?” This is why you see that the App Store and play store are now full of these little nuggets.
And as this is the 21st century, who can stop the tech giant Google to create yet another chatting app? Say hello to Allo, Google’s very own chatting app.
Allo’s History:
A long time ago, in 2016, Google first talked about launching the app as mentioned above at a conference. This was all in all a very smart move. Google Pixel was unveiled, and they needed their own pre-downloaded chatting app.
So why not create their own?
We all use Whatsapp web these days. It has become famous for making lives a lot easier, especially for working from home. In the same spirit, google proclaimed that they were working on a web app extension for computers.
Then it failed. And it failed so unceremoniously that I don’t even know how to write it down.
The first glimpse was visible in April of 2018. Here, Google stated that they are pausing their developments on Allo. You can see where things are going from here in December of 2018, the same year when Google announced that the support for the Google Allo App would be discontinued in March of 2019.
The released update was their last. It allowed the users to export their chat messages from Google Allo app. And as they started, the service was shut down effectively from march 2019.
So what was the reason for this app being shut down? Should we consider this a failure? These are some of the questions that we plan to focus on in today’s article. But before we dive any deeper, let’s understand what sets Google Allo apart from others.
Here’s a list of features:
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It was a chatting app with a hip and trendy user interface.
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It allowed for a lot of chat customization with stickers etc.
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The Smart reply feature could analyze your chat patterns and give you customized suggested responses.
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It had a very easy and simple interface to provide a better user experience.
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It gave users the benefit of incognito messaging. Though this mode did not include any smart reply option.
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Integrated google assistant meant that you could now do a full-fledged search.
The last two features are important as they could be possible USP for Google Allo. After all, Google itself is the king of search engines. This was also met by many positive reviews, with people saying that GoogleAllo was the better and improved version of Siri.
But as always, the negative reviews were coming in as well. And from none other than the great whistle-blower, Edward Snowden himself. He criticized Google’s decision to disable the end-to-end encryption in their app. And according to him, this made their app unsafe by default.
Here’s a list of other problems that were common with Google Allo
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Despite considering itself a trendy app, it had a very limited selection of stickers.
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It had a problem with not being integrated with the other messenger supported by Google.
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Though it did boast about providing search, it was finicky at best.
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It had a very bad SMS Support system.
And ladies and gentlemen, the last part was going to be the bane of this app. Listen. I know you hate SMS. Everyone does. But SMS offers some crucial core functions in today’s tech-driven era. The Problem with Google Allo was that it has a decimal SMS support system, which was important as we have already mentioned before.
At the same point, your account was secured by your phone number. Yup. In a “Google’s” app, your account was tied down with your phone number. Something tells me they didn’t think this through.
The lack of some core features was too much for their users, and they started opting out of the app.
After all, why would anyone choose to chat with Google Allo when other improved messaging platforms were available? And this was the nail in the coffin for this app.
Facing immense competition with other well-entrenched apps in the industry, Google Allo had no choice but to sue for pre-mature defeat. The saddest part is that Google Allo wasn’t even that bad app. It was shown to be responsive, trendy, and very fast.
But when you have a poorly integrated app that competes with your other app (Hangouts) in a highly competitive industry, then I don’t think there was any way for Allo to succeed.
Conclusion:
Google Allo’s journey can teach
app developers a lot about app development. This shows that no matter how big you are, it will probably fail if your product isn’t what the market wants.
Some people will be smiling, thinking how this failure humbled google. Others will look at it and not make the same mistake again.
So what have we learned?
Always make sure that your core features are taken care of. The rest is just a bonus. If you’d like to know more about
mobile application development, then please check out our other articles
here.
Thank you.