Now that the app has been around a while a new feature has surfaced that shows Google is thinking along the lines of Snapchat and offering users of the app the ability to send incognito messages and to send messages that automatically expire after a bit.
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Google Allo was first revealed at I/O 2016, and now key features of the app have been revealed once again by AndroidPolice. Android Police was able to get some hands on time recently with a test version of the app; this is what we know so far. That means you won’t be able to let Google invoke context from your conversations to do things like help you pick out a restaurant or reserve movie tickets.
The duration of the timer can be changed at any point by any of the chat participants, but changes won’t apply to old messages, so if a message has already been sent with a 1 week expiry time then changing the timer to 1 minute won’t make it disappear any faster. And even if the search results can’t be loaded now, it doesn’t seem like there’ll be an error, instead Assistant will wait until the search is able to process and get back to you with an answer when it can. According to Android Police, the same graphic will also appear on top of contacts’ profile photos while in this mode, meanwhile any notifications you receive won’t display a preview of the message’s content. You can choose 5 seconds, 10 seconds, a minute, an hour, a day, or a week. On other apps, a user can set a timer for each message in a conversation.
There are two big caveats with the current implementation.
One unusual caveat is that it appears you can’t view the timer on any messages you send or receive until it disappears, essentially forcing you to read any messages you get straight away and quickly. If you are sending something you don’t want the person you are chatting with to be able to save, the expiration time is going to be your friend.
Moving outside of private conversations, the app doesn’t seem to have a cloud sync or backup function.
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On the plus side, it will finally allow you to search through all of your conversations – something Hangouts notoriously lacked.
