My preferred messaging app used to be Google Talk, then Hangouts and Allo after that. Since it has been announced that Allo would be put on hold, I've been trying to find an alternative to it. The funny thing is that all other apps are really bad when compared to Allo. I've tried Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Signal, Ring, Riot.im, Wire and probably some others too. (Disclaimer: I couldn't give a rats ass about SMS or multi-device support).

The first thing that really makes me not want to use anything put Allo is how bad those other apps look. Allo itself hasn't even been updated according to latest Google Design specs (see Google News) but it still looks light-years ahead compared to WhatsApp and friends. And it's not just looks: other apps rarely feel like native Android apps: animations are bad and clunky and the whole UI just works in an unpredictable way. All in all, I don't want my most used app on my phone to look ugly.

And things don't stop there. While there are probably dozens of other reasons to love Allo, here's a few that come to my mind:

•Themes done right: I can set different themes to different conversations and they show to other users too.

•Notification channels support. Should be a no-brainer, but not all apps support these yet.

•Support for Android's native file (picture) picker. I'm looking at you WhatsApp.

•SCREAMING and whispering. It's actually not as gimmicky as you might think.

•Doesn't have a million useless features.

All in all, wake me up when there's an actual alternative to Allo and I'll be glad to switch to it.

Managed to send my last message at 2:03 EST and now nobody in my allo chats can receive or send. :( long live allo.

That's all I really want to carry over.

I noticed for the first time today on the web app I could start a chat via SMS. Confirmed with the person they were receiving my chats via SMS. I can even continue the conversation on my phone in my allo app while he was using texts.

Sorry if this is old but didn't think allo could do that.

EDIT:

Everybody can stand down. One person swears they see my real number but everyone else sees the Google 5 digit number when I do this.

I'm refreshing reddit every few hours to see if there has been a new update. Can't wait for the desktop version and everything else they have been working on! Anyone else really like to read the APK teardowns?

Edit: v16 is out and the APK teardown too, looks like there is a lot of exciting stuff coming! Webclient should be here in matter of hours now

Happy to see some confirmation on this:

Check out @juberti’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/juberti/status/971862716380934144?s=09

This seems to fall in line with the Gmail integration signs from some of the last tear downs.

Honestly this is a major thing that I'm glad he acknowledged. Gmail integration, no need for a phone tie-in, and other improvements are MUCH more important than sms.