WARNING: Minor cursing.

The big G has done it again: shuttered another app that failed to gain
mainstream popularity: Allo, in this case.

It was supposed to be Android's answer to iMessage, I believe. But as
I have pointed out many times before (maybe not here), they already
had an answer in Hangouts. When Allo and Duo came out all what? 3? 4?
5? years ago, I was pissed because Hangouts did SMS, MMS, chat, voice
chat, and video chat. Why did they need Allo and Duo? Note: I still
use the Hangouts app as my SMS app because I have a Big G phone
number. I also use it as a group chat for a former G+ group that died
when the Big G decided that G+ just wasn't worth it anymore. But to
"regular" people, Hangouts doesn't support SMS. Because the Big G is
run by assholes.

While I'm not really affected by it (I actually just tried to sign up
for it, wouldn't you know it, on March 1, the day they said they'd
stop supporting it), I can only imagine how many people actually are.
While G+ was pretty unique in its social media experience, I suppose
Allo is mostly the same as any bloated chat program with stickers. It
was using RCS and had unlimited(?) size video attachments, although I
seriously doubt you could send, say, a 1TB video. Or maybe it's just a
higher quality than the MMS standard, which is pretty bad by today's
standards.

Anyway, this is just a little callback to my earlier destructive
stupidity rant about the Big G shuttering apps/programs when the wind
blows a certain direction. Because of course you can't just stop
updating an app and let people use what they want to use. No, that's
silly. You have to force them to migrate to something you want them to
use. Android Messages now. Messages even has desktop(?) browser (yes)
integration, something that previously was basically a Hangouts (or
Voice, maybe) exclusive in the G Suite.

So essentially instead of improving apps or at least letting them stay
stagnant (which sucks), the Big G is throwing out everything and
creating new apps from scratch to do something that already is being
done by another older and quite possibly better app. Heck, I even had
a bit more appreciation for Allo and Duo because of the CLI mandate of
making a program do one thing really, really well. I personally prefer
less apps + more functional apps, a one-stop shop if you will, but I
can at least understand the separation of text and video chat, even if
I don't agree with it. Now they're just supplanting less-popular Allo
with more-popular de facto Messages, which isn't even default if the
Android phone/tablet has been perverted by the manufacturer with weird
skins that needlessly rearrange things in the name of
not-really-all-that-different aesthetics (I'm looking at you Samsung.
Mostly you. You dopes.) and redundant manufacturer apps.