9 ms·

Google Allo – First Impression

92 points by jandll 10y ago

ipsin 10y ago
"than again", I'm going to blame Emacs...
bilbobeer 10y ago
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-25/edward-snowden-warns-whatever-you-do-dont-use-google-allo http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-25/edward-snowden-warn... Edward Snowden Warns, Whatever You Do, Don't Use Google Allo ... I have a better suggestion, DONT USE GOOGLE. Period.
hackaflocka 10y ago
If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you: GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use. Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText. Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration). So, what I would LOVE is something like GMail for texting... i.e., GText. - Almost unlimited storage in the cloud so I can keep all my old texts. - Access to all my texts via a web browser. - Search through all my old texts with powerful Google Search. - Never lose old texts just because I changed my phone. - All the cool GMail features such as Labels and Filters, and colors for labels.
- paulcole 10y ago
  Doesn't this basically exist in Google voice? I've been using it for 6+ years and it's a great (albeit free) service.
- hbosch 10y ago
  You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0]. It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS, without a proxy! Hopefully this small project will take off and eventually become bigger than Allo. 0. http://hangouts.google.com http://hangouts.google.com
  - alttab 10y ago
    Plus for the most part if people are still on gChat it uses that. I have no idea why the cool parts of allo aren't just a feature of chats in Hangouts.
  - chrishynes 10y ago
    I use and love Hangouts for this exact reason. I haven't found anything that can do the IM+Voice+SMS combo crossplatform. I don't get why Google isn't pressing Hangouts hard vs. letting it languish. It really should be a core product that ties everything together. Unified contacts, instant communications of all varieties, whether SMS, IM, voice, video... Since it hasn't got an update in forever, the UI is crappy, and they've turned off all API access and denied people writing third party clients. I now wish there was an alternative, but I haven't found anything that does it all. Why, Google, Why!?!?
  - lewisl9029 10y ago
    > It stores your texts in the cloud forever It does? Are we talking about SMS here? Last time I checked Hangouts certainly did not sync SMS messages. A real shame because I miss that functionality sorely when switching between devices.
    - modeless 10y ago
      It does if you use Google Voice or Google Fi.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - ack 10y ago
    And you can use it in your browser!
  - ce4 10y ago
    Little known? You must be kidding. It has more than 1 Billion installations [0]. It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse. The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account, needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat. On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well). As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though, we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations). The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :)" [0]: https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE
- NolF 10y ago
  I use an app that backs up all my SMS/MMS onto Gmail (SMS Backup+). It labels them accordingly and separates them by contact. The downside is that MMS are put on a separate conversation and conversations are limited to 100 messages. But the import process puts them all neatly back onto the phone (except MMS). I don't often have to check for old emails so I don't re-import all the texts when I switch phones, the web interface suffices. It also puts all calls as a calendar event (including length) and entry in the conversations. I find this feature very useful.
- CardenB 10y ago
  You can get your old texts via encrypted backup. Apple doesn't store them server side. It's not a migration issue.
  - hackaflocka 10y ago
    Which is why I wrote "idiot-proof". Things such as "encrypted backup" and "server side" are difficult to parse when I'm under the pressure of changing a phone. Plus, Apple has a bad enough reputation as it is (with cloud / syncing). I want my old texts to reappear magically without having to know these complicated sounding concepts. GMail does that. GText would if Google created it along similar lines.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    It would be nice to have an option to move them between phones without relying on restoring the iTunes or iCloud backup of a previous device. I just got my new 7+ on Thursday and as with every new device I get I was keen to just start from a clean slate (my home screen on my 6+ was a mess and instead of cleaning it up I just decided it would be easier to start from square one, all my photos were already on my iCloud photo library and all my music on Apple Music) - annoyingly enough while a large chunk of my core experience was migrated over messages were not. Now, considering iMessage uses E2E encryption and they don't store any of this data outside of your iCloud backup I'm not shocked, but considering I already get notified that iMessage was set up on another device and the public key is sent to Apple so new messages can be encrypted with it I don't see why my existing device couldn't just "catch-up" the new one like Skype used to do before they moved message history server-side.
- cylo 10y ago
  Everything you just described is a complete privacy nightmare.
  - hackaflocka 10y ago
    At this stage, I've given up caring about my privacy :-)
- threeseed 10y ago
  Not sure what's going on with your use of the iPhone. Every iPhone user has an iCloud account which almost all are backing up to right now. So when you change phone you just need to do a Restore from iCloud and all of your messages will just be there. I would consider it pretty idiot proof.
  - hackaflocka 10y ago
    For starters, iCloud has a 5GB limit (free tier). And that limit has been used up by lots of other things in addition to iMessages. iCloud backups are also known to fail. Someone I know just can't get the backup to work on their iPhone.
    - Twisell 10y ago
      Most of the drawbacks of iCloud have been totally overcome years ago, and 5Gb is totally sufficient since only personal data is backed up, media file (music,video,Apps) are not. Go to the next Apple Store and enjoy a free unlimited in time support for theses issues. Every time I came by a Genius Bar for support I have witness "dumbs" users crying tears of joy after an epic data recovery thanks to the dumb-proof iCloud backup (and that exactly why both my parents are backed up on iCloud, for some people "dumb-proofness" is more important than privacy concerns)
- pilif 10y ago
  >And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration). curious: How do you change phones? I have never lost any messages in iMessage when I was moving between phones.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- touristtam 10y ago
  > Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration). Funny, cause Xiaomi has this working fine. I've changed device not long ago and it freaked me out a little.
mtthwmtthw 10y ago
The assistant piece of Allo is not too bad at all for a first drop. I noticed that it handled context decently between users who invoked the assistant in their chats. If you ask about a type of takeout in a specific place, and then the other party in the chat says "what about another type" without referring to the place, it handles the situation. However, if the first person says something right after the results are returned. It ignores the context. The Google team also added the ability to not return the same response for any given request, unless the request falls into generic search. It's not necessary, but gives it that human kind of element, and keeps it interesting. I didn't try any kind of logical reasoning since it seemed to be heavily reliant on Google search, which is still keyword based to a degree. One day this will probably change, but it's a hard problem to solve given an open domain. I thought I would see more direct integration with APIs as opposed to defaulting to search. I don't think I saw any in-fact beyond what is offered through search. EG - book me a ride with uber just goes to the search results. I'm wondering if this team is working together with the home product. If there is also a heavy reliance on search, I can't imagine the user experience will be that great.
- visarga 10y ago
  > more direct integration with APIs That would be amazing to have. Users should be able to define custom commands, queries and chat replies.
- drusepth 10y ago
  I'm guessing the lack of APIs is due to the Assistant being in a preview state, and that we'll see the start of a slew of them on Oct 4, when things like Google Home are released (and are also powered by the Assistant, according to the assistant if you ask it what Google Home is). Right now, you can ask the assistant to turn on/off lights, call a taxi, etc, and it just responds with "I can't do that yet."
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Trying to chat with others I find difficult. Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. In fact many of my techie friends, two of which worked at Google, are not even on it and it doesn't work with any of Google's existing chat apps. So I have to go out of my way to try to get friends on it. Nope. Too much friction. Gave up. The AI is okay but didn't seem much better than, say, Google Now. So I didn't really understand why I would even use it. Dou is kinda the same way and I really wish they would have combined them. You could even let the AI work in the video mode and if it overheats something it can add information.
- MBCook 10y ago
  I believe it IS Google Now, I think it's been rebranded as Google Assistant. The only difference is that it's directly in your chats with other people like a third person.
  - visarga 10y ago
    Compared to Google Now, Google Assistant is more conversational. So it basically does: commands, trivia, funny chat replies and when it doesn't know what to do, web search. I checked and it doesn't do common sense judgements. "What is heavier, a dog or an elephant?" -> returns web search Also, doesn't find conditional references. "What is the population of the city I am currently in?"
- IanCal 10y ago
  > Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. Doesn't it send them a text with a link to get allo? I'm certain it sent my wife a text like this.
  - hyptos 10y ago
    yep it does that why I instantly uninstalled !
  - 10y ago
beefsack 10y ago
The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html
- Veratyr 10y ago
  I'm just waiting for Matrix to get E2E going... For now, XMPP works well enough.
  - jrv 10y ago
    E2E is already activated in Riot web and will come to mobile in a month or so (at least according to what Matthew said in the Matrix room on Matrix).
  - Shank 10y ago
    Yep, same! I'll run my own homeserver for me and my friends when E2E kicks off.
  - corney91 10y ago
    To be honest, I don't even think E2E is as important in a distributed system. If you're worried about who can see your messages, you can just set up your own server and force server-to-server and client-to-server encryption.
    - dublinben 10y ago
      You shouldn't have to set up your own server to have secure communication. It should be the default for all users.
      - mxuribe 10y ago
        Right now, yes, agreed that to "set up your own server" is not for the casual user...but eventually setting up a server should be as a straight-forward affair - not unlike installing an app from an app store/marketplace. Also, remember that there was a time when casual users would go through the set up of local/desktop clients in order to simply read/write email - e.g. outlook express, thunderbird, apple's mail app, etc. Whether we call it setting up a server, or installing/setting up an app., eventually it won't make much difference.
guruparan18 10y ago
You can ask @Google assistant to set a reminder, check your emails, draft and send email to your contacts, share your location(in group). You can summon @Google in your group chats. So far it is certainly an interesting toy.
- corndoge 10y ago
  You can also do all of these things with the Google app, with the exact same inputs. I had a full conversation with Allo that I repeated verbally after saying "Ok Google" and the results were identical.
  - bvm 10y ago
    Can you check your emails with 'OK Google'? I use my Android phone as a satnav, and it would be really helpful on the commute to get it to read me the at least the subject lines of my inbox, I can't seem to make it do anything other than Google "Read my unread emails".
    - jclos 10y ago
      That's certainly my biggest disappointment so far with the Google Assistant, even though I understand that they will improve it with time. I wish it was at least better integrated within the Google ecosystem, so that I can interrogate it regarding my emails, my calendar or my contacts. Why can't I reference a friend using their google+ handle? Or ask for my next dentist appointment that's on my calendar? Or my last amazon order receipt in my mails? Hopefully stuff like that will come and it will make the Assistant a bit more useful and less gimmicky.
      - spacehunt 10y ago
        "Show my next flight to Melbourne" and "show my last Deliveroo email receipt" both are working for me.
  - guruparan18 10y ago
    Agreed. But I prefer text interface over voice. Having @Google assistant in group chat is kind of creepy but still interesting. It can share my location to the group, show weather and other search results. I wish Google assistant can setup group reminders(now it does not). It is certainly already replaced my Google search.
wanda 10y ago
I wasn't impressed until I messaged Google Assistant a photo of my tabby cat (no text, just the photo), to which the assistant responded with search suggestions about tabby cats. While not breaking new ground by any means (I mean this and more have been done before), it's very cool to have it in my pocket, as it were, and I'm going to keep Allo installed for now just to see where the Google Assistant goes. Really wish I could handle SMS messaging from within Allo so I wouldn't have to switch between apps to talk to people. It's bad enough that my colleagues use WhatsApp and two groups of my friends use Slack and Facebook Messenger, respectively. I really don't understand Duo though. It's a nice little app and also nice to have a cross-platform alternative to FaceTime (which I've never used precisely because the majority of my friends do not use Apple devices) but Hangouts did video already, why not just rebuild Hangouts from scratch as Duo and Allo in one app? Yes, I realise this is the question that has been on everyone's lips and has been asked many times before and after the launch of these apps. I've still yet to see a sensible answer though.
- disillusioned 10y ago
  I regularly show people Google Photos and shout at them DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW INCREDIBLE THIS IS? IT KNOWS WHAT "FOOD" MEANS IN BASICALLY ANY VARIATION YOU CAN THINK OF! My favorite "this shouldn't be possible" searches are food, flowers, sunsets, dogs, (to which it returned a picture of my dog's BUTT in the dog door. No face. No paws. Just a butt with tail sticking out) Christmas (to which it returned a photo of my wife, taken in July, at Bronner's Christmas Village in Michigan, etc. It's completely incredible how accurate it is, and it's transformed the way I access and use my photos. I still cannot get over how "food" can mean literally millions of things and it will show me plates, people eating, food on a table, food in a takeout container, individual ingredients, food being cooked, etc. Those are all so dramatically different that the fact it's able to return them so accurately boggles my mind.
gambiting 10y ago
Seeing as Hangouts is becoming worse and worse and worse(recent update removed tabs on the bottom of the screen, now it's all in a single window - and I get notifications in the corner of the screen with the full content of each message - really awkward if I'm in a meeting. In the old version, a tab would light up green and that was it. But the absolute worst offence is that there is no way to go back to the old interface - google took the executive decision to break it for everyone, so they did, I'm really pissed off about it), I would really like to switch to a different IM. Allo would be nice, if not for the fact that it doesn't have a desktop client. That's unacceptable.
pritambarhate 10y ago
From the article: > It’s like the early days of the iPhone – the skeuomorphism design helped users get accustomed to use it, through the icons that imitated physical objects. Once they got educated, more than 8 years latter, the flat design was introduced. Does anybody have a link for an official proclamation from Apple confirming this? To me it felt like an effort to bring something new and exciting as skeuomorphism was getting boring after 6 revisions of the of the OS. I dread that day, but I think in a few years, skeuomorphism will come back, once some high profile designers will get bored with minimalistic flat design and will proclaim how "amazing" skeuomorphism is.
- nicky0 10y ago
  Jony Ive was interviewed about it at the time. “When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.” From http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-decided-to-gut-skeuomorphism-out-of-ios/ http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-dec...
  - pritambarhate 10y ago
    Thanks for the reference.
Leynos 10y ago
Having tried it out, I'm more than a little puzzled. What I don't understand is why make this yet another new platform, instead of just adding it as a new feature to hangouts? All they've done is introduce friction to the onboarding process. Unless I'm really missing something here. As the linked article says, Google already has our contacts, and they already have a list of the people we chat with, etc. Why not just make use of this instead of asking everyone to start from scratch again?
namaemuta 10y ago
When the AI ends up showing me a Google search, it's kind of disappointing. If I wanted to do a Google search, I'd do it myself instead of adding the step of asking the AI to search it for me.
billyjobob 10y ago
I'm finding the auto responses suggested by Allo to be pretty creepy. They are just close enough to what I would type to tempt me to save time by clicking on them. But they aren't actually the words I would choose myself. Yet the recipient thinks these words are mine. So Google is subtly modifying the very language used by billions of people. Shades of Newspeak.
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  You are already selecting precanned phrases in your mind most of the time, this just visualizes it. You still can cognitively work harder to write a new phrase, this just let's your instinctual responses come out faster.
- bagacrap 10y ago
  Yes. It would be nice if allo visually marked the canned responses on the receiving end.
piyush_soni 10y ago
I see a lot of people asking why not club this feature (and Duo) into Hangouts. I use Hangouts too, but it looks like they'd grown too complicated for a common user who wanted to 'just' do a quick text chat or a quick video chat. Hangouts had chat, SMS, video, phone calling and what not. While I didn't see any problem at all with that and found that good (except the UI that was still not good), probably it's a little daunting for some people. I still wish what others are wishing here, that there is a unified app which just does all these things nicely with enough simplicity.
- visarga 10y ago
  What I find useful about Hangouts is SMS history backups. Android should backup SMSes when moving to a new phone.
omouse 10y ago
>Right now I’m not, and although he is a bit more of a privacy snob than I am, Snowden already made a point about the lack of privacy in Allo. Wow, this is what a product designer thinks? That he's a privacy snob? When the NSA and GCHQ and others willingly violate the privacy of people every day by using the information that Google, Microsoft/Skype and others collect? There's such a thing as a privacy snob? WTF.
stevewillows 10y ago
It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS. With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison. When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these days. I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of incorporating these features into one of their existing applications. It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.
- soylentcola 10y ago
  For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising. And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.
  - wldcordeiro 10y ago
    The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.
jamespo 10y ago
Looking forward to v2 which adds multilingual (French & German) support, codenamed 'Allo 'Allo

92 points by jandll 10y ago

ipsin 10y ago

"than again", I'm going to blame Emacs...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-25/edward-snowden-warns-whatever-you-do-dont-use-google-allo http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-25/edward-snowden-warn... Edward Snowden Warns, Whatever You Do, Don't Use Google Allo ... I have a better suggestion, DONT USE GOOGLE. Period.

hackaflocka 10y ago

If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you: GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use. Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText. Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration). So, what I would LOVE is something like GMail for texting... i.e., GText. - Almost unlimited storage in the cloud so I can keep all my old texts. - Access to all my texts via a web browser. - Search through all my old texts with powerful Google Search. - Never lose old texts just because I changed my phone. - All the cool GMail features such as Labels and Filters, and colors for labels.

paulcole 10y ago
Doesn't this basically exist in Google voice? I've been using it for 6+ years and it's a great (albeit free) service.
hbosch 10y ago
You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0]. It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS, without a proxy! Hopefully this small project will take off and eventually become bigger than Allo. 0. http://hangouts.google.com http://hangouts.google.com
- alttab 10y ago
  Plus for the most part if people are still on gChat it uses that. I have no idea why the cool parts of allo aren't just a feature of chats in Hangouts.
- chrishynes 10y ago
  I use and love Hangouts for this exact reason. I haven't found anything that can do the IM+Voice+SMS combo crossplatform. I don't get why Google isn't pressing Hangouts hard vs. letting it languish. It really should be a core product that ties everything together. Unified contacts, instant communications of all varieties, whether SMS, IM, voice, video... Since it hasn't got an update in forever, the UI is crappy, and they've turned off all API access and denied people writing third party clients. I now wish there was an alternative, but I haven't found anything that does it all. Why, Google, Why!?!?
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  > It stores your texts in the cloud forever It does? Are we talking about SMS here? Last time I checked Hangouts certainly did not sync SMS messages. A real shame because I miss that functionality sorely when switching between devices.
  - modeless 10y ago
    It does if you use Google Voice or Google Fi.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- ack 10y ago
  And you can use it in your browser!
- ce4 10y ago
  Little known? You must be kidding. It has more than 1 Billion installations [0]. It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse. The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account, needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat. On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well). As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though, we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations). The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :)" [0]: https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE
NolF 10y ago
I use an app that backs up all my SMS/MMS onto Gmail (SMS Backup+). It labels them accordingly and separates them by contact. The downside is that MMS are put on a separate conversation and conversations are limited to 100 messages. But the import process puts them all neatly back onto the phone (except MMS). I don't often have to check for old emails so I don't re-import all the texts when I switch phones, the web interface suffices. It also puts all calls as a calendar event (including length) and entry in the conversations. I find this feature very useful.
CardenB 10y ago
You can get your old texts via encrypted backup. Apple doesn't store them server side. It's not a migration issue.
- hackaflocka 10y ago
  Which is why I wrote "idiot-proof". Things such as "encrypted backup" and "server side" are difficult to parse when I'm under the pressure of changing a phone. Plus, Apple has a bad enough reputation as it is (with cloud / syncing). I want my old texts to reappear magically without having to know these complicated sounding concepts. GMail does that. GText would if Google created it along similar lines.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  It would be nice to have an option to move them between phones without relying on restoring the iTunes or iCloud backup of a previous device. I just got my new 7+ on Thursday and as with every new device I get I was keen to just start from a clean slate (my home screen on my 6+ was a mess and instead of cleaning it up I just decided it would be easier to start from square one, all my photos were already on my iCloud photo library and all my music on Apple Music) - annoyingly enough while a large chunk of my core experience was migrated over messages were not. Now, considering iMessage uses E2E encryption and they don't store any of this data outside of your iCloud backup I'm not shocked, but considering I already get notified that iMessage was set up on another device and the public key is sent to Apple so new messages can be encrypted with it I don't see why my existing device couldn't just "catch-up" the new one like Skype used to do before they moved message history server-side.
cylo 10y ago
Everything you just described is a complete privacy nightmare.
- hackaflocka 10y ago
  At this stage, I've given up caring about my privacy :-)
threeseed 10y ago
Not sure what's going on with your use of the iPhone. Every iPhone user has an iCloud account which almost all are backing up to right now. So when you change phone you just need to do a Restore from iCloud and all of your messages will just be there. I would consider it pretty idiot proof.
- hackaflocka 10y ago
  For starters, iCloud has a 5GB limit (free tier). And that limit has been used up by lots of other things in addition to iMessages. iCloud backups are also known to fail. Someone I know just can't get the backup to work on their iPhone.
  - Twisell 10y ago
    Most of the drawbacks of iCloud have been totally overcome years ago, and 5Gb is totally sufficient since only personal data is backed up, media file (music,video,Apps) are not. Go to the next Apple Store and enjoy a free unlimited in time support for theses issues. Every time I came by a Genius Bar for support I have witness "dumbs" users crying tears of joy after an epic data recovery thanks to the dumb-proof iCloud backup (and that exactly why both my parents are backed up on iCloud, for some people "dumb-proofness" is more important than privacy concerns)
pilif 10y ago
>And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration). curious: How do you change phones? I have never lost any messages in iMessage when I was moving between phones.
deleted 10y ago
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touristtam 10y ago
> Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration). Funny, cause Xiaomi has this working fine. I've changed device not long ago and it freaked me out a little.

mtthwmtthw 10y ago

The assistant piece of Allo is not too bad at all for a first drop. I noticed that it handled context decently between users who invoked the assistant in their chats. If you ask about a type of takeout in a specific place, and then the other party in the chat says "what about another type" without referring to the place, it handles the situation. However, if the first person says something right after the results are returned. It ignores the context. The Google team also added the ability to not return the same response for any given request, unless the request falls into generic search. It's not necessary, but gives it that human kind of element, and keeps it interesting. I didn't try any kind of logical reasoning since it seemed to be heavily reliant on Google search, which is still keyword based to a degree. One day this will probably change, but it's a hard problem to solve given an open domain. I thought I would see more direct integration with APIs as opposed to defaulting to search. I don't think I saw any in-fact beyond what is offered through search. EG - book me a ride with uber just goes to the search results. I'm wondering if this team is working together with the home product. If there is also a heavy reliance on search, I can't imagine the user experience will be that great.

visarga 10y ago
> more direct integration with APIs That would be amazing to have. Users should be able to define custom commands, queries and chat replies.
drusepth 10y ago
I'm guessing the lack of APIs is due to the Assistant being in a preview state, and that we'll see the start of a slew of them on Oct 4, when things like Google Home are released (and are also powered by the Assistant, according to the assistant if you ask it what Google Home is). Right now, you can ask the assistant to turn on/off lights, call a taxi, etc, and it just responds with "I can't do that yet."

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

Trying to chat with others I find difficult. Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. In fact many of my techie friends, two of which worked at Google, are not even on it and it doesn't work with any of Google's existing chat apps. So I have to go out of my way to try to get friends on it. Nope. Too much friction. Gave up. The AI is okay but didn't seem much better than, say, Google Now. So I didn't really understand why I would even use it. Dou is kinda the same way and I really wish they would have combined them. You could even let the AI work in the video mode and if it overheats something it can add information.

MBCook 10y ago
I believe it IS Google Now, I think it's been rebranded as Google Assistant. The only difference is that it's directly in your chats with other people like a third person.
- visarga 10y ago
  Compared to Google Now, Google Assistant is more conversational. So it basically does: commands, trivia, funny chat replies and when it doesn't know what to do, web search. I checked and it doesn't do common sense judgements. "What is heavier, a dog or an elephant?" -> returns web search Also, doesn't find conditional references. "What is the population of the city I am currently in?"
IanCal 10y ago
> Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. Doesn't it send them a text with a link to get allo? I'm certain it sent my wife a text like this.
- hyptos 10y ago
  yep it does that why I instantly uninstalled !
- 10y ago

beefsack 10y ago

The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html

Veratyr 10y ago
I'm just waiting for Matrix to get E2E going... For now, XMPP works well enough.
- jrv 10y ago
  E2E is already activated in Riot web and will come to mobile in a month or so (at least according to what Matthew said in the Matrix room on Matrix).
- Shank 10y ago
  Yep, same! I'll run my own homeserver for me and my friends when E2E kicks off.
- corney91 10y ago
  To be honest, I don't even think E2E is as important in a distributed system. If you're worried about who can see your messages, you can just set up your own server and force server-to-server and client-to-server encryption.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    You shouldn't have to set up your own server to have secure communication. It should be the default for all users.
    - mxuribe 10y ago
      Right now, yes, agreed that to "set up your own server" is not for the casual user...but eventually setting up a server should be as a straight-forward affair - not unlike installing an app from an app store/marketplace. Also, remember that there was a time when casual users would go through the set up of local/desktop clients in order to simply read/write email - e.g. outlook express, thunderbird, apple's mail app, etc. Whether we call it setting up a server, or installing/setting up an app., eventually it won't make much difference.

guruparan18 10y ago

You can ask @Google assistant to set a reminder, check your emails, draft and send email to your contacts, share your location(in group). You can summon @Google in your group chats. So far it is certainly an interesting toy.

corndoge 10y ago
You can also do all of these things with the Google app, with the exact same inputs. I had a full conversation with Allo that I repeated verbally after saying "Ok Google" and the results were identical.
- bvm 10y ago
  Can you check your emails with 'OK Google'? I use my Android phone as a satnav, and it would be really helpful on the commute to get it to read me the at least the subject lines of my inbox, I can't seem to make it do anything other than Google "Read my unread emails".
  - jclos 10y ago
    That's certainly my biggest disappointment so far with the Google Assistant, even though I understand that they will improve it with time. I wish it was at least better integrated within the Google ecosystem, so that I can interrogate it regarding my emails, my calendar or my contacts. Why can't I reference a friend using their google+ handle? Or ask for my next dentist appointment that's on my calendar? Or my last amazon order receipt in my mails? Hopefully stuff like that will come and it will make the Assistant a bit more useful and less gimmicky.
    - spacehunt 10y ago
      "Show my next flight to Melbourne" and "show my last Deliveroo email receipt" both are working for me.
- guruparan18 10y ago
  Agreed. But I prefer text interface over voice. Having @Google assistant in group chat is kind of creepy but still interesting. It can share my location to the group, show weather and other search results. I wish Google assistant can setup group reminders(now it does not). It is certainly already replaced my Google search.

wanda 10y ago

I wasn't impressed until I messaged Google Assistant a photo of my tabby cat (no text, just the photo), to which the assistant responded with search suggestions about tabby cats. While not breaking new ground by any means (I mean this and more have been done before), it's very cool to have it in my pocket, as it were, and I'm going to keep Allo installed for now just to see where the Google Assistant goes. Really wish I could handle SMS messaging from within Allo so I wouldn't have to switch between apps to talk to people. It's bad enough that my colleagues use WhatsApp and two groups of my friends use Slack and Facebook Messenger, respectively. I really don't understand Duo though. It's a nice little app and also nice to have a cross-platform alternative to FaceTime (which I've never used precisely because the majority of my friends do not use Apple devices) but Hangouts did video already, why not just rebuild Hangouts from scratch as Duo and Allo in one app? Yes, I realise this is the question that has been on everyone's lips and has been asked many times before and after the launch of these apps. I've still yet to see a sensible answer though.

disillusioned 10y ago
I regularly show people Google Photos and shout at them DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW INCREDIBLE THIS IS? IT KNOWS WHAT "FOOD" MEANS IN BASICALLY ANY VARIATION YOU CAN THINK OF! My favorite "this shouldn't be possible" searches are food, flowers, sunsets, dogs, (to which it returned a picture of my dog's BUTT in the dog door. No face. No paws. Just a butt with tail sticking out) Christmas (to which it returned a photo of my wife, taken in July, at Bronner's Christmas Village in Michigan, etc. It's completely incredible how accurate it is, and it's transformed the way I access and use my photos. I still cannot get over how "food" can mean literally millions of things and it will show me plates, people eating, food on a table, food in a takeout container, individual ingredients, food being cooked, etc. Those are all so dramatically different that the fact it's able to return them so accurately boggles my mind.

gambiting 10y ago

Seeing as Hangouts is becoming worse and worse and worse(recent update removed tabs on the bottom of the screen, now it's all in a single window - and I get notifications in the corner of the screen with the full content of each message - really awkward if I'm in a meeting. In the old version, a tab would light up green and that was it. But the absolute worst offence is that there is no way to go back to the old interface - google took the executive decision to break it for everyone, so they did, I'm really pissed off about it), I would really like to switch to a different IM. Allo would be nice, if not for the fact that it doesn't have a desktop client. That's unacceptable.

pritambarhate 10y ago

From the article: > It’s like the early days of the iPhone – the skeuomorphism design helped users get accustomed to use it, through the icons that imitated physical objects. Once they got educated, more than 8 years latter, the flat design was introduced. Does anybody have a link for an official proclamation from Apple confirming this? To me it felt like an effort to bring something new and exciting as skeuomorphism was getting boring after 6 revisions of the of the OS. I dread that day, but I think in a few years, skeuomorphism will come back, once some high profile designers will get bored with minimalistic flat design and will proclaim how "amazing" skeuomorphism is.

nicky0 10y ago
Jony Ive was interviewed about it at the time. “When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.” From http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-decided-to-gut-skeuomorphism-out-of-ios/ http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-dec...
- pritambarhate 10y ago
  Thanks for the reference.

Leynos 10y ago

Having tried it out, I'm more than a little puzzled. What I don't understand is why make this yet another new platform, instead of just adding it as a new feature to hangouts? All they've done is introduce friction to the onboarding process. Unless I'm really missing something here. As the linked article says, Google already has our contacts, and they already have a list of the people we chat with, etc. Why not just make use of this instead of asking everyone to start from scratch again?

namaemuta 10y ago

When the AI ends up showing me a Google search, it's kind of disappointing. If I wanted to do a Google search, I'd do it myself instead of adding the step of asking the AI to search it for me.

billyjobob 10y ago

I'm finding the auto responses suggested by Allo to be pretty creepy. They are just close enough to what I would type to tempt me to save time by clicking on them. But they aren't actually the words I would choose myself. Yet the recipient thinks these words are mine. So Google is subtly modifying the very language used by billions of people. Shades of Newspeak.

tsunamifury 10y ago
You are already selecting precanned phrases in your mind most of the time, this just visualizes it. You still can cognitively work harder to write a new phrase, this just let's your instinctual responses come out faster.
bagacrap 10y ago
Yes. It would be nice if allo visually marked the canned responses on the receiving end.

piyush_soni 10y ago

I see a lot of people asking why not club this feature (and Duo) into Hangouts. I use Hangouts too, but it looks like they'd grown too complicated for a common user who wanted to 'just' do a quick text chat or a quick video chat. Hangouts had chat, SMS, video, phone calling and what not. While I didn't see any problem at all with that and found that good (except the UI that was still not good), probably it's a little daunting for some people. I still wish what others are wishing here, that there is a unified app which just does all these things nicely with enough simplicity.

visarga 10y ago
What I find useful about Hangouts is SMS history backups. Android should backup SMSes when moving to a new phone.

omouse 10y ago

>Right now I’m not, and although he is a bit more of a privacy snob than I am, Snowden already made a point about the lack of privacy in Allo. Wow, this is what a product designer thinks? That he's a privacy snob? When the NSA and GCHQ and others willingly violate the privacy of people every day by using the information that Google, Microsoft/Skype and others collect? There's such a thing as a privacy snob? WTF.

stevewillows 10y ago

It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS. With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison. When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these days. I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of incorporating these features into one of their existing applications. It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.

soylentcola 10y ago
For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising. And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.
- wldcordeiro 10y ago
  The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.

jamespo 10y ago

Looking forward to v2 which adds multilingual (French & German) support, codenamed 'Allo 'Allo