If you are among the few million Allo users out there, here’s some bad news for you. Google has decided to pause investment in Allo as it works on Chat, its new SMS replacement and iMessage competitor based on Universal RCS as revealed by Anil Sabharwal, the head of communications group at the company.

Google is going all in on Chat and so it is pouring all its resources into its development. For now, Allo is taking a backseat. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Allo has not achieved the level of popularity which Google had hoped for. The company had hoped that Allo would have hundreds of millions of users, but with only around 50 million downloads for Allo’s Android app, the messaging service has failed to catch on with customers. Google will continue to support Allo for the foreseeable future until it gets around to take a final decision about it.

Second, Google immediately wanted to scale up the development of Android Messages to add features that are already found on Allo: Assistant integration, Stickers support, GIF search, and more.

It is not like Allo is a bad messaging app by any means. It just failed to catch the attention of consumers in a world that is already filled with plenty of messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, with each having their own sizeable user base.

Our Take

Anil Sabharwal has essentially sugar-coated the death of Allo here. Given that Google is pouring all its resources into Android Messages and Chat for the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that the team will get back to working on Allo again. After all, Chat has a higher probability of meeting with success than Allo since it is going to act as an SMS replacement, and it will be pushed by carriers instead of Google.