Allo looks to be getting a new feature called Activities sometime in the near future. While there’s no indication at the moment of when Google plans to roll out this feature to its chat application, it’s speculated that development may already be in a state where the team is focusing on giving the feature some polish so that it looks good and functions without issues before rolling it out to users.
Activities, as the name suggests, is a feature that would essentially give users who are in the app chatting with friends or family an activity set to interact with to pass the time or stay engaged. There are a few different things which appear to be a part of the activities feature so far, and this includes a set of four different games which users could open up and play with their contacts. The games include Quick, Draw! which tasks you with drawing six different items before the timer runs out, Toadal Pondage which tasks you with hitting your opponents with bubbles and the first to ten points wins, Pet Hotel which lets you collect pets and compete for their favor, and then a group Chess game which lets you simply play Chess against your friends.
In addition to the games, which could stay at these four or expand if this is something Google is looking to build out, there are also options to share your location and attach files to chats. These options aren’t new as they’re already available within the app, but as it stands there are dedicated buttons for these options in the bar below the chat box, but with the activities feature they have been moved to inside of a popup window, which shows up when you tap a newly added “+” button that will be sitting to the left of the camera button that opens the camera within Allo. This popup also adds the ability to created a shared list, which presumably lets anyone who is in a chat with you when you create this list access it and its contents. It also looks like when a user attempts to open up a game to play from the Activities list, it will have a loading progress bar with the option to cancel should users change their mind on playing before it starts. As mentioned above it’s not clear when exactly Google plans to add the Activities feature, but it could be getting prepped for a near future update.
