Google released their new chat app titled Allo into the Play store and it has already gotten about 10,000 downloads in about a day (at the time of writing this article). Allo is vetted as a straight competition to Whatsapp and Facebook messenger and we take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of these apps.
All of us use Whatsapp and all of us love it. We all know almost everything about it and have grown to love its simplicity and ease of use. It also offers free voice calls which are a big plus for Whatsapp. Groups are an integral part of Whatsapp and it allows a person to make a group of up to 256 people which is extremely convenient. Users can also just create a join link for a group and they will be added trouble free
Positives
- Ease of use
- Minimal design
- Vast media sharing capabilities
- Minimal data usage making it fast
- End to End encryption
Negatives
- Call quality isn’t great
Facebook messenger
Facebook has been around for a really long time and it has 1.7 billion daily active users, it also recently forced upon its users the Facebook messenger without which texting on Facebook wasn’t made possible. The app has quite a few features up its sleeve like video calling and voice calling among others. Media sharing has always been present and there has been a recent addition in forms of GIF creation and sharing, stickers, Money sharing (available only in the US) and group chat among others. To use Facebook messenger one has to either have a Facebook account or a phone number using which an account can be made on the app.
Positives
- Convenient
- Uses chat heads and works over your running app
- Stickers and GIFs
- Non-intrusive
Negatives
- Eats a lot of data
- Very buggy and laggy
- Slow
- Not well designed
Google Allo
The latest entry to the game from Google is Allo, it’s simple, it’s neat and it’s so much fun! Allo adds so many new features to texting that it takes the app to a whole new level. Allo is assisted by a self-learning AI which keeps learning words a person uses as they go, it also then suggests replies automatically based on the message received and all you have to do is tap on it to send. The integration of Google search/assistant is another ground breaking feature of Allo which means in a chat you can ask Google to do various tasks for you like look up the number of your favorite restaurant or check the movie timing near you and all you have to do is type @google before your command, it also lets You play small games and quizzes in the app so you are not bored.
Stickers is another integral part of the app and it makes it so much more interesting to use, you can also edit the size of the text you send just by sliding up or down on the send button. Everything isn’t hunky dory about Allo though and there are a few downsides too, first being the chats not being encrypted and Google will have complete access to the texts you send and eventually use it to target advertisements to a user. The design is another aspect which should be improved on and it lacks basic functionality like changing the background etc. There is an incognito mode present on the app with self-disappearing messages and timed chats along with End to end encryption but that is yet to be tested out.
Positives
- Integration of Google search
- Self Learning AI
- Stickers, image editor and media sharing
- Ability to increase or decrease the size of text
- Intelligent replies
- Incognito mode
Negatives
- Lack of end to end encryption in normal chats
- Poor design
- Slower compared to other platforms
- Bloated overall
Conclusion
With the recent launch of Allo Google is set to disrupt the already saturated market but to what extent that is yet to be seen, as of yet as always Whatsapp is our favorite but Allo has huge potential to overtake it in the long run.