Wednesday last week, Google launched its newest messaging app Google Allo with an artificial chat bot baked inside; the Google Assistant. A little over a week later, the app has over a million downloads. All in a span of just one week.
No mean feat by any standards; not even Edward Snowden’s warning to cyber security conscious people not to download the app, could slow down the app. The interesting part is that Allo surpassed the one million mark in less than a week; on Sunday to be precise.
That should be worrying news for the other competing messaging apps, mainly to WhatsApp. In many ways, Allo seems to be directly competing with WhatsApp more than it is with the other messaging apps like Messenger and Telegram among others.
The app comes laden with useful features like; at the basics ability to doodle on a picture and send it to your friends. You can also share stickers, photos, and media with friends. For now, WhatsApp seems to have an upper hand because of its Voice Call ability and end-to-end encryption. However, considering that Allo is barely two-weeks-old, one can only assume more features are in the production pipeline, so watch this space.
For an overview of the feature Allo has to offer, check out our earlier articles on the messaging app. Nonetheless, it still doesn’t sit well with many people why Google is making many versions of the same thing. Instead of merging the different features on the various apps into one super app.
Take, for instance, Google Hangout, Messenger, Duo, and now Google Allo. At the core definition, these are all messaging apps. They all have their strong selling points, but if they could be collapse into just one single app with all the features, will be great. This business of downloading two, three and more apps from the same company that more or less do the same thing is not cool; not cool at all!
