Google Allo, Goodbye!

Google hasn't had much luck with messaging. What started off as Gchat aka Google Talk in 2005 became Google+ Messenger and then Hangouts, only to be relegated as a business chat platform in the form of two separate apps Chat and Meet. Let's not forget that Google also operated a social network called Orkut that came with its own messaging features baked in, before it was ultimately shut down ten years later in 2014.

In the midst of all this, Google introduced two more chat apps Allo and Duo, one for instant messaging and other for video calls, in 2016, but paused development on the former early this year to focus more heavily on an RCS-based solution called Chat.

Whether Chat will really take off and give stiff competition to iMessage remains to be seen, but Google seems to be really going with a four pronged approach to tackle messaging going forward, thereby putting an end to swirling rumours about impending Hangouts and Allo shutdown.

To that effect, Google is sunsetting Allo (effective March 2019) and Hangouts too (sometime in 2019, the timeline is unclear), but the search giant has said that existing users will be migrated to Hangouts Chat and Meet "at some point," adding, "We're fully committed to supporting Hangouts users in the meantime."

This is not the first time Google has killed a chat app, and for a company that has released a lot of game-changing products, it has long had a complicated, messy strategy when it comes to social networking, axing a laundry list of communication products, including the social network Buzz, and the collaboration tool Wave. Back in October, it also announced it's shutting down Google+ after it discovered a security bug that left private profile data exposed.

Ultimately though here is what Google is banking on:

• Chat, an SMS replacement based on RCS, for messaging, file transfers and more
• Google Duo for video calls
• Hangouts Chat and Meet for corporate… and existing Hangouts users
• Google Fi and Voice for telephony and messaging (and in a classic Google move, the two apps can't talk to each other)

Which is frankly still a lot. But if you would like to pay your last respects to Google Allo, feel free to do so by visiting Killed by Google or Google Cemetery. Chances are however pretty slim that anybody would really miss it.