Google has today shut down its Allo messaging service in an official statement on its blog. Allo was meant to be Google’s response to popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram. For those familiar with this search giant company, this news isn’t entirely unsurprising, given that Google had already stopped investing in this product development back in April. Back then, the head of the communications group at Google, Anil Sabharwal, noted that
[Allo] as a whole has not achieved the level of traction we’d hoped for.
Allo will “continue to work through March 2019,” Google says, and users will be able to export their conversation history until then.
The timing for Allo’s pending shutdown is particularly apt, given that the company announced its intention to launch RCS (Rich Communication Service) with several telecom companies on board including Airtel in Africa. Unlike Allo, RCS Chat will be carrier-based in its implementation, and could finally give Google the sort of iMessage competitor it’s been looking for on Android for all these years, albeit through a service that won’t actually be run by Google at all.
Will RCS survive?
It’s also important to point out that RCS Chat is not the same thing as Google’s Hangouts Chat, the re-branded version of Google Hangouts designed for enterprise users that will eventually replace the classic Hangouts experience with something that looks similar to services like Slack. Google says Hangouts Chat and Meet, the video solution, will both be available to existing users “at some point”. Whether RCS will survive will depend on how quickly all mobile telecom companies will adopt it and fast it can replace regular SMS.
