Google Executive Teases a Web Version of Google Allo

It’s fair to say that Google Allo hasn’t had the warmest greeting from the Android community at large. Before the application was even launched we saw the hype building as many hoped it would be Google’s answer to iMessage on iOS. Many were also hoping that the application would be more fleshed out and feature-packed upon release too. Something that was never hinted at by Google, mind you,  but still something that many within the community were hoping for.

The messaging space is very crowded on Android right now and some people were just hoping that Google Allo could compete with the best right out of the box. Google obviously treated it as a 1.0 release and shipped it with minimal features at first. To their credit, the company has been communicating with the user base and is actively wanting to make the user experience as good as it can be. Still, there are some big features that the community has been wanting but now it looks like Google will be fulfilling one of those requests soon.

Google has said they want to become a mobile-first software company and that’s exactly what they did with the initial launch of Allo. Lots of big competitors in this space also offer a way to use their service on a desktop through a web browser. Facebook allows this, WhatsApp allows this (albeit in a restricted way) and a lot of people have stuck with Hangouts because Allo did not offer this feature. It wasn’t clear if Google was even going to offer the option but now it’s been made official.

Nick Fox helped start Project Fi, he was a former leader of Google search advertising division, and is now the Vice President of Communications Products at Google. He sent out a tweet late last night with a screenshot of how Allo will look on the web. It seems the URL for this will be http://ift.tt/2lfHQtL (although this could change by launch), and they’ve even baked Google Assistant into the web portal for it. Mr. Fox says it’s still in “early development,” so we shouldn’t expect it to be available soon. But it’s nice to know they are working on a solution for those who want to use it on a desktop PC.

Source: @RealNickFox

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