CNBC just announced that Google plans to kill the chat app Allo by the middle of 2019.
The tech giant revealed this is an official blog post and this way they confirmed an earlier report that the demise of this product is imminent.
Google still cannot rival Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger
Despite owning the world’s dominant smartphone OS system in Android, Google has never been able to create a chat experience to rival Apple’s iMessage or Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp.
Allo launched two years ago, and it will be working only until March next year. Then, users will have to download any conversation that they might want to save.
Google’s focus will switch on the development of Messages which is its other app for Android smartphones.
A while ago, Google revealed that they wer4e working with mobile carriers on “a new Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard, an upgrade to classic SMS texting, to make messaging work better across Android devices,” CNBC reveals.
It seems that this initiative was the beginning of the end for Allo.
Google will support Hangouts
Google also said in their blog post that the company plans to support another one of its chat applications, Hangouts until it makes two of its enterprise apps Meet and Hangouts Chat available for the non-paying users as well.
“All users will have access to Chat and Meet, just like Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc. Right now Chat and Meet are only available to G Suite users, but this will change in 2019. Hangouts classic supports team messaging and what we call ad-hoc video calls,” a Google employee tweeted.
1/ All users will have access to Chat and Meet, just like Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc. Right now Chat and Meet are only available to G Suite users, but this will change in 2019. Hangouts classic supports team messaging and what we call ad-hoc video calls.
— Scott Johnston (@happyinwater) December 3, 2018
When it comes to chat apps, Google’s strategy is a bit weird, and they axed a lot of communication products including the very original GChat, Buzz, the social network and also the collaboration tool named Wave.
3/ Chat is meant to cover the messaging use cases that classic does. Still work to do to make this a reality. This is why we are running the products in parallel, and haven't decided on sunset or migration timing. Once we do, we will clearly communicate.
— Scott Johnston (@happyinwater) December 3, 2018
Earlier this year, the tech giant also announced that they’d be shutting down the social network Google Plus following the discovery of a security bug.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.
