With Duo launching this past week we were wondering if Allo would show itself. According to Android Police, the app is, in fact, being tested, the messaging component at least, and of course, they’ve got their hands on a few screenshots. Today we’re getting our first look Allo’s Sticker Packs and message deletion.
Sticker Packs
Stickers, they have become a central part of the messaging experience, if a picture is worth a thousand words a sticker may be worth twice that. Today’s leaks show off the range of stickers available in Allo.
Allo will offer 24 sticker packs typically with 24 stickers n each pack, that’s around 576 Googley stickers. Before you get to excited it doesn’t look like custom sticker packs are coming, personally, I’m gutted by this, I just don’t think I can communicate without my Business Fish sticker pack.
If the leaked screenshots are correct you will start your Allo sticker experience with just 3 sticker packs by default with the option to add more, and the starting packs are…..
From there you have the ability to add 21 more packs to the interface. This is an improvement over Hangout’s method of just giving you all the packs and you having to sift through a pile of mediocre stickers to find the one you want to send. Allo will allow you to add and remove Sticker packs at will.
Once installed you also have the option of arranging the order so you most favourite stickers are at the left-hand side of the list. If you want to check out the style of each pack check them out below.
The art style of the Stickers is similar to that in Hangouts however in some of the packs Google may have walked a little more on the wild side.
Message deletion
The actual news about Allo is that it will let you delete individual posts from your message stream. This isn’t a new feature, apps like Telegram have included the option for some time, however, the newness of a feature is less important than its utility. It’s important to note that like Telegram deleting the message will only delete it from your device, it won’t remove it all together from all participants of that chat.
The feature can be handy if someone else posts something you just don’t want showing up on your device, we’ll let you decide what that might be. At the moment it doesn’t allow you to select multiple messages to delete. Message deletion is a handy feature and we’re glad to see it finally coming to one of Google’s chat apps.
As with all rumoured features, until it is released anything can change. With Android 7.0 rumoured to be releasing very soon and Allo in active testing we may well see it land on our devices, perhaps without Google Assistant integration at launch, very soon.
The success of this app for me will depend on its cross-device support and, long term web support. A chat app that is only usable from one device is completely useless to me when the competition offers multi-device, multi-platform support. Please Google, get it right.
How is Allo shapping up for you? Let us know below
