Comments on post “Google Allo”
Serge Lobatch
@slobatch · Product Manager
Why make the decision not to support true SMS fallback at launch? With such a crowded market for messaging apps, I question the decision to pursue the short-code SMS relay route. Sure, my iPhone-using contacts will get a download link (boosting adoption), but am I more likely to annoy them than to get them to download a new thing?
How big a factor in potential mass adoption is any individual user's (and potential advocate's) aversion to accidentally spamming their contacts?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@slobatch backwards compatibility tends to hamper product innovation and force lowest common denominator design. Most of the features of Allo don't translate back to text-only well. How would you do stickers? Expensive MMS? Read receipts? Not possible. Allo is for users with data or who are on Wi-Fi. It's about the next 10 years of messaging, not the past... at least as far as I would attempt to understand their strategy.
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Serge Lobatch
@slobatch · Product Manager
@chrismessina I hear that. I think we will see people continue to move away from SMS over time, but I think claiming that focusing on SMS would hamper product development is a bit of a cop out for two reasons:
1. When you're entering a market with so many competitors this late, you must account for network effects. How do you achieve critical mass when everyone's already got their favorite messenger? You know what else hampers innovation? A lack of traction. A lowest common denominator is a boon in this scenario, especially had Google positioned Allow as "Android's iMessage," and then given it AI superpowers.
2. There isn't a single feature of Allo that is wholly incompatible with SMS fallback. Stickers? Yeah, send them as SMS. Google's "Messenger," which is solely for SMS has exactly that functionality. Read receipts? Don't offer them for SMS messages. Frankly, all these issues are already addressed relatively well by iMessage or even by Facebook Messenger, which can be set as a default messaging application on Android. Heck, even Hangouts has attempted (albeit clumsily) to address these issues.
I get that any company wants to move away from the ugly stepchild that is SMS (and even uglier, MMS) and focus their efforts on the future, but you're not going to do it without a strong user base and a strong foundation.
Maybe future releases will reveal that Google plans to make Allo the messenger they referred to in their Jibe/RCS update email. Maybe everything I think will be proven wrong. Right now, I'm pretty skeptical.
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Justin-Alexander
@alexzibrit
@slobatch I constantly see this critique of Allo around the web and I find it astonishing, mostly because most Americans don't seem to be aware of the fact that SMS incurs it's own individual charge per message in many countries, for instance in my current country of residence (Barbados) each text amounts to $0.20, which you can imagine adds up pretty quickly. This alone is what made Whatsapp the leading messaging client here after the Blackberry and BBM boom died. Thus if messages defaulted to sending an SMS without a connection it would inconvenience most users. Frankly I like what Google appears to be doing, which is sending an SMS from a proxy number when a contact doesn't have Allo installed or sending a notification via play services, it seems like a better decision rather than continuously clinging to the inferior SMS, which was supposed to be "Killed off" by these messaging apps in the first place
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Serge Lobatch
@slobatch · Product Manager
@alexzibrit admittedly, I am biased as an American user of messaging services, and SMS has been largely unlimited here for years now. It may very well even be that I'm not Google's intended market with this play.
Genuinely curious, do you expect your contacts will switch over to Allo to chat with you, or do you expect most of them to continue using WhatsApp? (Sorry if that sounds combative, I actually want to hear how you think things will go.)
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Mickey Bennet
@werewookiee · Engineer, Global Sanchez Inc.
@slobatch . Google is a major player in RCS, the next update to SMS that should be adopted by all carriers. This should play some part in their decision
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Willie Morris
@morewillie · Formerly Amazon, Boeing, and Faithbox
@slobatch Agreed. Not being backwards compatible with SMS is a deal breaker for me. I don't buy into it hampering product innovation, there's ways to gracefully fallback until SMS is officially dead. I switched over to Android about a month ago and the biggest issue I have is messaging. Nothing quite compares to iMessage and Apple managed to fallback to SMS support for non-imessage users. I was hoping Allo would be that app for Android.
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Del Williams
@delwilliams · Founder, Private Curator
@slobatch @chrismessina are you forgetting Google owns a mobile OS, and those Androids are sold more than iPhones. Second, I help people move their stuff from one device to another, whoever lied and said sms was going away is a moron. In the USA, it's still the cheapest way to communicate.
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