One more service goes to Google's graveyard: the Allo messaging app is out of date, and will only work until the end of March. Google is now betting on the RCS protocol, a successor technology to SMS, for the exchange of messages between Android cell phones.
Launched in 2016, Allo is one of the messaging apps that Google is trying to promote, but it fails: that's how Hangouts did too. Allo had the differential of a deep integration with Google Assistant, but it did not fall in favor with the public and ended up being little adopted in a market dominated by names like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
According to information from Google, the service had only 50 million users in the first half of 2018 – WhatsApp, for example, has more than 1 billion users around the world.
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The end of Allo was already foreseen: Google stopped the development of new features for the app in April, and now has confirmed that it will only work until March 2019. Users will be able to download the entire chat history of the app, if they wish.
Regarding messages, Google follows some bets in the area. One of them is Duo, an application that was launched together with Allo and only allows video calls. It continues to be updated frequently and recently gained a faster method of starting conversations with contacts.
Another alternative offered by Google is Hangouts. While the “classic” version of the app is on its way out, the enterprise version, which is split into the Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet apps, should be made available to the general public at some point in the future.
However, Google's big bet is on the RCS messaging protocol, created to be the successor to SMS. It has features found in current messaging apps – reading and typing alerts, the ability to send videos and images in high quality – but it still depends on operators to be sent. The Android Messages application already supports the technology, which is gradually being implemented by telecommunication companies around the world.
