Are you one of the 10 million who have installed Google Allo?

Google’s messaging platform has reached another milestone – three months after its launch, it has now passed 10 million installs on the Play Store. 10 million might sound impressive on its own, but in reality, Google Allo just isn’t doing too hot.

Google introduced Allo and Duo way back in May. Duo was first to launch, and this video-calling sibling has been doing comparatively well. In fact, it surpassed 10 million installs some time ago and is headed for the 50 million mark. Allo, on the other hand, is a different story.

Four days after its launch, it garnered 5 million downloads, and it’s taken Allo three more months to get another 5 million. Of course, all apps tend to peak during the first week or so of its launch and then die down, but Allo’s plateauing happened too soon, it seems. Take an app like Pokemon Go, for instance: during its launch weekend, it hit 50 million downloads on the Play Store and continued the trend to well over 500 million just two months after the initial release date.

Or let’s have a look at Facebook Messenger, which launched in August, 2011. It was in August, 2014 that the app hit 500 million downloads on Android, which means that on average, around 14 million people installed it per month over the course of three years. Compare that to Allo with 3 million per month, and that’s during its peak period!

There are several factors at play here, in my opinion. First, the market is oversaturated: we have the default messaging app that comes with every phone, we have Facebook Messenger, and we have a slew of other messaging apps that are more ubiquitous like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik, etc. There’s simply no reason to get yet another app when what you already have does the exact same job. Second is Allo’s lack of SMS support. Google Allo can’t be used as a default SMS app, meaning you’ll have to get your friends to download Allo in order to communicate with them. It may have a wide array of stickers for you to use, but without that convenience, what do those stickers mean? And even if it added SMS support, the story wouldn’t be too different. Newer generations that do use SMS will stick to preloaded SMS apps, and younger generations that are seeing a shift away from SMS messaging will continue to use more popular platforms like Facebook and Snapchat.

So who are these 10 million people who have downloaded Google Allo? Are they simply curious or does Google Allo truly offer something that others don’t? Are you using Google Allo on a regular basis?