Earlier this year, during their annual Developer’s Conference Google announced both Allo and Duo, two very different messaging apps that the Internet giant hopes to complete their messaging puzzle. While the latter launched some time ago across Android and iOS, the former has only just gone live. It’s available in the Play Store for the majority of users right now, but if it isn’t yet, you can download it here. Allo is a new kind of messaging app that Google hopes will deliver a more fun and more modern way of messaging each other on Android. It also brings with it the Google Assistant, a sort of Google Now bot that users can chat to in order get things done and get answers to their general queries and such. So far, the app seems to be well-received, but it’s not without its problems, as many users are discovering.
One of these big hurdles that will certainly put off some people is that users can only use Allo on one device at a time. This seems like a fairly straightforward limitation, as many apps allow you to only use it on one device, but Allo seems to take this a whole lot further. Let’s say, for instance, that you were to move to a new device – like a replacement Galaxy Note 7, for example – you would lose all of your pictures, messages, chats as well as your profile picture. It seems to effectively wipe the slate clean and then ask you to start from scratch all over again. Ron Amadeo on Twitter shared the below screenshot of him using Allo on a different device, and was given a “heads up” from Allo that as it was activated on another device, he wouldn’t be getting any notifications on this new device. For a lot of users, this will be a deal breaker. In the world of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Google’s own Hangouts, we expect to be able to connect and reply to anyone from anywhere. With those three services you can do and while some make you jump through more hoops than others, they all offer a pretty solid cross-platform option.
Many users are complaining that Allo appears to be a half-finished product, as there’s no Direct Reply support in Android 7.0 Nougat and there’s little in the way of support for Android Wear at this point, either. As of writing, Allo has only just launched of course, and there’s a good chance that Google will be adding updates to the service to improve its usability on all platforms. Given Google’s push for this to become a very popular phone messaging app to rival the likes of iMessage, they should be keen to put these issues to bed as soon as they can.
