> you might think is meant to replace Google's other messaging app, Hangouts. But you'd be wrong.

Oh thank goodness! I'm so happy to have another vaguely defined and horrifically executed messaging/chat/collaboration/VTC/whatever app from Google. This will simplify things.

Remember back when every app used a common protocol, or when one app unified multiple protocols?

Those were the days, right?

Unfortunately tied to your phone number. I realise this is what makes WhatsApp popular, but it's a UX nightmare for travelers/multinationals.

I'm currently doing without WhatsApp because I have no way to activate it on my replacement phone (dropped original one) - the SIM tied to my WhatsApp account doesn't work overseas and I'm using a local SIM.

It's a frustrating, confusing experience. What's wrong with tying this to your Google account?

> Unfortunately tied to your phone number > ... > What's wrong with tying this to your Google account?

Or, as I recently learned after switching to Project Fi, the worst of both worlds where I am forbidden from using Google Voice on my Fi phone because ... reasons? I can't even navigate to the Voice website without considerable hoopjumpery because Chrome realizes that I'm on a Fi phone and immediately redirects me to the Play store where I can install Fi - you know, that app that came with my Fi phone?

Just damn.

I'm with that other commenter: I thought, mistakenly, for a while there that we were going to have chat interop, if not from XMPP then from the multiple WebRTC products. But, ha ha, I must be new here.

This is meant to be a WhatsApp competitor.

As opposed to Hangouts, their existing chat system for sending and receiving text/images/video between phones on multiple networks and operating systems. That's obviously in a different market.

The fragmentation of chat systems is already crazy, and now Google needs to have two?

My prediction: Allo runs for two years then gets a half-hearted merge into the Hangouts client, bringing over a couple of major features but not the ones that made people actually prefer it as a chat client.

So Google is trying to collect the data necessary to impersonate the text-conversational style of anybody who uses their new app. Interesting.

Google is doing another mistake....