Allo, like Tez, which is now Google Pay, was targeting the Indian market considerably by way of using phone numbers for identity, instead of the Google Account infrastructure that already existed. The lure was that it was supposed to be easier to setup and already had a social graph. I believe Allo and Duo were supposed to be complementary and fight against WhatsApp dominance. Tez “won” only because they were giving out cash. Allo obviously never did that.
But that’s why it wasn’t integrated into the rest of the ecosystem: it was a Google product but not tied to your account to try to fight against WhatsApp, et al., which left it on its own island, which didn’t work very well.
Of course it was too good to be true. Google taketh away.
I can understand poor design choices from a engineering heavy org - but why do the products get technically worse (less featureful, less integrated) over time?
I suspect there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
At some point that was true for Facebook chat too.
But then both companies decided that chat system interoperability was bad for their business (which I'm not sure is true).
Issues with XMPP support were big reasons I stopped using Google's messaging apps altogether. (It didn't help that at the time I was using GSuite as primary XMPP, because I wanted my primary Jabber ID on a domain I controlled, and communicating with Gmail primary users I recall seemed through a weird internal federation boundary that had its own strange federation issues even before Google started shutting down outside federation.)
1. Teams in the organisation create some good products that solve specific discrete requirements, such as an email client, a document editor, text chat, audio calls, video calls, video conferencing, etc. This usually goes along with marketing slogans like “x, reinvented” etc
2. Someone comes up with this great vision of a single unified interface in which all those discrete apps are integrated. The marketing here usually includes terms like “seamless”, “enterprise” etc.
3. Some other people notice that the discrete products have become so tightly integrated that they are missing out on users that do not want to sign up for the integrated enterprise experience, but who just want the discrete product feature. Usually competitors will have stepped into that void created in step 2 and it’s easy to convince management that they’re leaving money on the table for competitors. Just extracting some features into a stand-alone product is sold internally as a quick-win (it never is).
4. Go back to step 2
I don't get why people keep making this point. I would say that no, the opposite is true: what you say starts out true, but the shifts are what killed everything. There was one good effort built on the "Google social graph" (ie. GTalk) that provided great service. It really increased the usefulness of gmail. Everything else decreased it's usefulness.
Then direction from above came, with Hangouts and Google Plus, their facebook competitor ... and destroyed one market at a time. Some market they didn't judge important.
(probably not in the correct order)
* Business/startup market (XMPP bots/integrations, there were companies using even GTalk as a way-before-slack business chatroom)
* Voice/video market got dropped (first time round: the integration with the PBX network)
* Google Fi integration got dropped
* GSuite integration got dropped
* XMPP market (obviously the techies fell under this)
* Voice/video got dropped (second time round: direct voice/video chat in Hangouts), in order to get critical mass for Allo/Duo, to support "only phone number" accounts
* Everything BUT Gsuite integration got dropped, in order to get critical mass for "GChat"
* Voice/video got mostly reinstated when the path for Allo/Duo became clear
* Voice/video got killed AGAIN in favor of "Google Meet" meetings, I believe first by limiting number of participants, then just dropping every form of video
I mean, even now I feel like people are showing INCREDIBLE loyalty to Gmail/GChat and Google is attempting to pull the rug somewhat from under them, in order to support their now enterprise initiatives.
And yet the one feature every enterprise has been screaming for to make gmail usable for business, shared inboxes and maybe some form of basic CRM is still not there (are people still having business-wide google accounts they hang out the password for in next to the door just so 5 people can respond to info@company ?).
I feel like Gmail's trajectory has roughly been this: 0 -> EXCELLENT product (in maybe 1 year total) -> today (14 years of focus shifting, abandoning one userbase per year) ...
I think the solution is to focus on Gmail as an email product with perhaps chat integration, but nothing more. THAT was what was needed. GTalk/Hangouts was always the chat app for more serious people. Google kept trying again and again to make it the app for whatever Google's focus was in $year, never did a good job, but abandoned part of the userbase with every focus shift.
It seems pretty clear that if they had settled on one brand ID for messaging and just iterated and refined on that for the past 15 years, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now and, I daresay, the dominant player. Everyone I know was using Google Talk after AIM, MSN messenger, and ICQ died (except we all called it GChat) because we already had GMail accounts. They could have built on that instead of throwing it all away. Now everybody's on iMessage, SMS, or WhatsApp.
Or, cast your mind back to the distant year of 2016. Hangouts was more than okay enough for most use cases (IIRC it even had SMS integration/fallback), and then Allo and Duo came along and Hangouts got canned. Allo was trash from the beginning (why did it exist at all?) and while Duo was (and continues to be!) great thanks to its adoption of QUIC, there was absolutely no reason for it to be a standalone app instead of a new feature in the Hangouts app.