Allo & Duo Review

I originally reviewed Allo & Duo in an episode of Second Opinion with Ryan Rampersad. Whether you listen or read, enjoy!

When Google announced Allo and Duo at Google I/O earlier this year, I was not thrilled. Hangouts was supposed to be Google’s one solution to all our messaging needs, and here they are fragmenting their own user base. The last thing I need in my life is more messaging apps.

Now that Allo and Duo are out in the wild, how do they stack up? Were they able to impress me enough to change my mind? The short answer is no, but the long answer is worth looking into. First I’ll talk about things the two have in common, then I’ll go into things that are unique to each.

Things They Have in Common

They are available on Android and iOS.

Google advertises this as one of their big features, but I am so disappointed. My guiding star for choosing consumer applications is that they have to be available on all platforms that I could reasonably want them on. At a minimum that includes Android, iOS, and web. Because neither Allo nor Duo are accessible on desktops, a non-negligible portion of my contacts can’t use them. Speaking of contacts…

They use your phone number to identify you, and use your phone contacts to populate their contacts list.

This is fairly reasonable, but my contacts list has far more emails than phone numbers. I understand that Google wanted to get away from the backlash of Google+ and avoid tying Allo and Duo to the social network. But I would prefer it if they used both phone numbers and email addresses to identify people.

You can only have one device associated with your number at a time.

This is the most annoying thing in the world. I can understand Google thinking that we’re in a mobile-first world, but that doesn’t mean that I only have one device. As soon as you sign in on a second device, you are signed out of the first. In Allo there is the added problem that when you switch devices, you lose all of your messages despite the fact that Google stores those messages on their servers.

They are not available on tablets.

The Google Play Store absolutely refuses to install them on my Shield Tablet, and on iPads they are scaled-up iPhone apps. Talk about narrow scope.

Allo

Allo is the instant messaging app that tries to differentiate itself with artificial intelligence features. The headline feature is the Google Assistant, which is the next evolution of the voice commands we’ve had in Google Now for quite a while. The Assistant is more conversational now, and in Allo it is presented as one of the contacts you can chat with. I’m a fan of this approach, because voice commands always felt like a cool technical achievement that was pushed on users; people don’t naturally talk to their phones, but they do chat with people all the time. It’s about bringing the feature to the users, instead of making the users go to the feature.

The Assistant can also be invoked in chats with other people, if there is information that you both need. This ties into other Google apps, and I believe third-party developers will also be able to serve information to the Assistant. In every presentation I have seen, they use the example of planning a restaurant trip, and the Assistant brings results from Google Maps directly into the chat.

So, how well does it perform in reality? I used it for a few tasks that I already knew were available via voice commands, but I made some new discoveries as well. For example, when I asked about the weather, the assistant asked if I would like a daily report on the weather. Now that is what I want from an assistant! I also gave it to my little sister, who was far more interested in its ability to hold a conversation than I was. She ended up playing games with it for the whole car ride.

Unfortunately, the Assistant is the only feature that sets Allo apart from the competition. It is intriguing for now, but once the Assistant is brought to more devices at the system level (as I’m sure it will be, starting with Google Home and the Pixel phones) there is no point in using Allo. And when you take its limitations into account, I cannot recommend anyone use Allo.

Duo

There is a lot less to say about Duo. It is a one-to-one video calling app. The interface is clean, simple, and to the point; when you open the app the only thing you can do is start a call. In our tests (listen to the podcast for a sample) the video quality was good, while the audio quality could have been better. However, this may have been because of the phone’s built-in microphone.

Duo’s one unique feature is called Knock Knock, which displays the video feed from a caller before you answer. Of course, Duo was not the first major player to do something like this; Snapchat introduced something similar earlier this year.

I am less disappointed with Duo than Allo, simply because there wasn’t much promise to begin with. Neither of them are worth using, though.

While I agree that Google needed to make moves in the messaging arena, this is about as far from what I had hoped for as we can get. Some of the new features are intriguing, but they should have been incorporated into Hangouts rather than rolled out as separate apps. And the fact that the new apps have severe limitations in areas that Hangouts and many other platforms excel has killed Allo and Duo’s chances of becoming relevant.

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