Disagree. The average user is not savvy enough to make this call. Secure end-to-end so I can have secure conversations with less technical people, and know we are both safe. It only take one party to escrow the logs to the server and all those conversations are no longer private. E2E||GTFO

Uh, no. Data loss for your end-users as a default behavior is unforgivable. The impetus is on people who think it's OK to irretrievably lose access to their freaking data when their phone battery explodes to set that up. For myself, and for Joe P. Random, losing my data without my having explicitly (and again) decided to take that risk is what directly precedes a decision to no longer use any Google products, full stop.

People already assume their voice conversations are (usually) ephemeral. As long as it is explained properly, an ephemeral text chat can not only be acceptable, it may also be a feature.

More importantly, why are you pretending that end-to-end encryption implies an irretrievable loss of data? If desired, backups can be made locally or to another local device such some type of LAN-only network storage or a USB storage device.

Exactly. Snapchat = ephemeral video sharing/chat. Why is it so big?

Exactly, and this is precisely why it's E2E by default with iMessage. One company makes money off of your information, the other makes money off your hardware.

That is how Allo works.

I'm big into privacy and that actually makes some sense to me. Though I'm a little concerned that if E2E isn't the default, it will be buried in the settings and most users won't ever think to use it.

> helper bots to add relevant content to the mix,

Is not that called an advertisement?

Have you used bots in Allo or telegram or facebook messenger or discord or slack? They can be very helpful.

I've often found the contrary - they add a lot of noise into the signal. For example, the gify bot encourages people to post response gifs to response gifs, creating pages of nothing but pure crap, making content harder to find than the proverbial needle in a haystack.

I don't need web pages expanded in-place, it pushes content off screen. I don't want CI/Jira/Pagerduty spam constantly dinging for my attention. I don't want random gifs. I don't want YouTube videos expanded and started automatically.

Maybe there's a good bot out there, but I haven't seen one yet.