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Google Allo – First Impression

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The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed.

Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens.

[1]: https://matrix.org

[2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html

I'm just waiting for Matrix to get E2E going... For now, XMPP works well enough.

Yep, same! I'll run my own homeserver for me and my friends when E2E kicks off.

E2E is already activated in Riot web and will come to mobile in a month or so (at least according to what Matthew said in the Matrix room on Matrix).

To be honest, I don't even think E2E is as important in a distributed system. If you're worried about who can see your messages, you can just set up your own server and force server-to-server and client-to-server encryption.

You shouldn't have to set up your own server to have secure communication. It should be the default for all users.

Right now, yes, agreed that to "set up your own server" is not for the casual user...but eventually setting up a server should be as a straight-forward affair - not unlike installing an app from an app store/marketplace.

Also, remember that there was a time when casual users would go through the set up of local/desktop clients in order to simply read/write email - e.g. outlook express, thunderbird, apple's mail app, etc. Whether we call it setting up a server, or installing/setting up an app., eventually it won't make much difference.

Actually, E2E does end up being really important in Matrix because room history gets synchronised across all the participating users in a room. So assuming you have /any/ non-local users in the room, they'll end up storing a copy of the conversation in plaintext-equivalent on their servers unless you have E2E, which rapidly becomes non-desirable for any private rooms given you don't want to have to trust everyone's sysadmins. And given 'run your own server' is half the joy of Matrix, we don't want to tell people to turn off federation if they want security!

This is why we've made a real effort with Olm & Megolm (http://matrix.org/git/olm/about/) in Matrix to ensure that E2E is there in the baseline, and will be turned on by default for all private rooms. (disclaimer: I work on Matrix)

I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet.

What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.

> I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet.

With the vast majority of email users using a tiny number of email providers, it effectively is. If Gmail decides that your personal mail server is sending spam, it becomes effectively useless.

Yeah, but there is no denying that email "federation" works very well (which makes sense, and it was pretty much the only major design goal). The lack of easy federation is why there are millions of chat 'bubbles' out there.

Also, chat ecosystems are somewhat federated on your device. Notifications and grouping (on iOS) and contacts integration (on Android and Windows) make it quite easy to run multiple chat clients at the same time so people do not bother.

The one big problem is group conversations, however.

Group conversation starts to suck when you have to fall back to SMS. Just from personal use, IM-type services handle it fine but they're not always cross platform.

Friends on iPhones use the iOS IM app but when they add someone to a group chat who isn't on iOS, they get the messages as attachments to MMS. Android's Messenger app handles this OK at the moment but it didn't always. And when SMS/MMS was integrated into Hangouts, it never handled it well.

Hangouts works fine for groups messages and at least you can install that on iOS but not everyone will want to use something else when they already use iMessage. Allo works but unless you use Allo, you get SMS/MMS from some random new number.

Basically, from what I gather, good group conversation support is a function of IP-based IM services and SMS/MMS was never really meant to handle that without workarounds and hacks. But SMS/MMS are a standard that any mobile device can handle whereas all the third party services and apps require either a particular OS or at least another messaging app to be installed.

Really would've loved to see a standard protocol with proper encryption and adoption by all major platforms but that doesn't seem to work for the Apples/Googles/Facebooks/etc of the world who would rather use Messaging as a way to keep you on their platform. Why would you leave when it would mean you can't keep those group chats you have with friends, family, and coworkers you've been having for all this time?

> a tiny number of email providers

The number is not tiny if you include work email addresses: @apple.com, @ibm.com, @whitehouse.gov, @mit.edu, @bmw.com, ...

Most often a Google Apps email address.

Lots of companies prohibit the use of gmail. Even sending to gmail addresses is sometimes prohibited.

> Even sending to gmail addresses is sometimes prohibited.

How do you know it's not a Google hosted email address if they use a custom domain (with a Google Apps plan one can use a custom domain on top of Gmail)?

Nobody's saying that arbitrary corporate restrictions are well thought out.

You can sniff MX records fairly easily to figure it out: https://github.com/jace/mxsniff

IRC is good in many ways, but it doesn't store messages for you. Your client has to be connected all the time or you will miss messages. It lacks good user accounts too, just NickServ.

This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.

Are there email servers aimed at Linux noobs?

Not really and the whole thing is a huge pain the ass if you want your emails to be received by Gmail/Yahoo/etc. recipients.

not that big pain in the ass once you get DKIM, DMARC and SPF working...

You can get round this by 'smarthosting' your outgoing mail. Typically this is your ISPs SMTP relay server. For example, I host my own Mail environment (MS Exchange, not that it's relevant) and all my outgoing mail is sent directly via SMTP to my ISPs smarthost. That smarthost then directs it where it needs to go based on the recipients domain. This way you are not sending mail directly from your 'untrusted' mail server, into say, Google or Yahoo.

I know from experience that I have to smarthost, as Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook.com reject silently any mail that come direct from my mail server. It's a pain, but there are solutions out there.

You can't really do it as a noob.

I mean, you can get a hosted VM and install Exim and Dovecot and drop in your domain name in the right places, but there are a lot of little things you have to deal with in order to get your mail to other people and others' mail to you without getting drowned in spam. Then you're fundamentally responsible for it and it can break while you're on holiday.

I used to do this, and still hang on to my own mail domain that I've had for 16 years, but I pay for it to be hosted now on a small provider.

I doubt that being a noob is compatible with running a mailserver for many reasons.

I've seen this mentioned a few times on HN: https://mailinabox.email/

No experience with it myself.

You can run http://www.iredmail.org/ which is an integrated toolkit of open source tools to make a mail server.

> What did email do right that chat did wrong?

It started out decentralised and became ubiquitous and mission-critical before any giants could gain enough market share to control it.

The only thing chat had close to it was IRC, but that has never been ubiquitous nor mission critical, and it's less attractive to newcomers than the proprietary alternatives.

Email allows just enough delay for antispam to do its work in, plus a whole range of antispam solutions involving backoff. Chat requires much lower latency.

Any federated/distributed chat system would have to deal with spam and abuse upfront in its design, or people would just migrate back towards controlled systems without those problems.

There's a second issue of where the chat continuity should be kept across devices, which favours hosted systems.

(There's no fundamental reason why you couldn't build an SMTP-based chat system by imposing convention on top of the protocol, favouring short messages with no Subject header. It's just that, as implemented, email is a little too slow.)

> Email allows just enough delay for antispam to do its work in

One solution is to only check for spam if the sender is not in your address book. And with chat, you usually have to allow somebody in your address book.

In email, senders can be trivially forged.

In a modern system, you'd probably want encryption and authentication of who you're talking to. Which is great except now you have to do key management, god help you.

Not so trivially with SPF / DomainKeys but without these being core parts of the original system they are limited.

E-Mail predates the commercialisation of the net. When the first companies came everybody already had a mail address, thus everybody depends on it (I.e. for registration, password lost, ...) Thus everybody still needs a mail address even though (in my observation) actual communication moves to WhatsApp and FB messenger.

By historical reasons we assumed that email must be interoperable so you can send email from gmail to yahoo or any other corporate controlled silo. We gave up that requirements with chats because there were very little expectations of interoperability despite XMPP.

Email is going to be interoperable forever, chats will become a 90-10 business like search. The only difference is that there will be different vertical chats monopolists for different markets (personal, business, developers, etc)

> What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.

Email is old enough to be grandfathered in. SMTP dates back to 1982, long before the commercialization of the Internet.

Chat doesn't have that history. It was first popularized by proprietary apps like AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, and MSN. When Jabber/XMPP came along and created an open standard, it was a reaction to the proprietary apps, which all had significant mindshare. Facebook and Google were the only major players to adopt XMPP, and that was just temporary until they managed to get their proprietary solutions off the ground.

It's taken surprisingly long for an open network like this to become common! You'd think that would be the only concept with longevity and "punch", due to the very nature of communications: unwalled always wins. I mean, that's why e-mail is still used. I also hope we'll get rid of these silly games by Google and others in the future.

I definitely want an open service to succeed. I think one big problem is with the major players, non-techies know they just work (more or less) and people will use them so there's not much hassle. Even among techies, there's chat fatigue now.

That being said, I have this nagging idea in my head that the more chat apps that get thrown at people, the easier it may be for an open service to prevail.

I'd tend to agree with you. With a diffusion of options you're essentially going to see the natural rise of 2 corporate competitors and 1 alternative option that many people support out of principle. It's a mind share pattern that seems to exist in many places:

Hipchat, Slack, Matrix

Windows, OSX, Ubuntu Linux

Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians

.NET, Java, Open Source Dynamic options -> Ruby/Python/Javascript/PHP/Elixir/Perl

It's worth noting that sometimes the alternative option wins... e.g. once upon a time on the web, the 2 corporate competitors were Microsoft IIS and Netscape Enterprise Server... and 'underdog' Apache :)

The assistant piece of Allo is not too bad at all for a first drop. I noticed that it handled context decently between users who invoked the assistant in their chats. If you ask about a type of takeout in a specific place, and then the other party in the chat says "what about another type" without referring to the place, it handles the situation. However, if the first person says something right after the results are returned. It ignores the context.

The Google team also added the ability to not return the same response for any given request, unless the request falls into generic search. It's not necessary, but gives it that human kind of element, and keeps it interesting.

I didn't try any kind of logical reasoning since it seemed to be heavily reliant on Google search, which is still keyword based to a degree. One day this will probably change, but it's a hard problem to solve given an open domain.

I thought I would see more direct integration with APIs as opposed to defaulting to search. I don't think I saw any in-fact beyond what is offered through search. EG - book me a ride with uber just goes to the search results.

I'm wondering if this team is working together with the home product. If there is also a heavy reliance on search, I can't imagine the user experience will be that great.

> more direct integration with APIs

That would be amazing to have. Users should be able to define custom commands, queries and chat replies.

I'm guessing the lack of APIs is due to the Assistant being in a preview state, and that we'll see the start of a slew of them on Oct 4, when things like Google Home are released (and are also powered by the Assistant, according to the assistant if you ask it what Google Home is).

Right now, you can ask the assistant to turn on/off lights, call a taxi, etc, and it just responds with "I can't do that yet."

From the article:

> It’s like the early days of the iPhone – the skeuomorphism design helped users get accustomed to use it, through the icons that imitated physical objects. Once they got educated, more than 8 years latter, the flat design was introduced.

Does anybody have a link for an official proclamation from Apple confirming this? To me it felt like an effort to bring something new and exciting as skeuomorphism was getting boring after 6 revisions of the of the OS. I dread that day, but I think in a few years, skeuomorphism will come back, once some high profile designers will get bored with minimalistic flat design and will proclaim how "amazing" skeuomorphism is.

Jony Ive was interviewed about it at the time.

“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”

From http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-dec...

Thanks for the reference.

I wasn't impressed until I messaged Google Assistant a photo of my tabby cat (no text, just the photo), to which the assistant responded with search suggestions about tabby cats. While not breaking new ground by any means (I mean this and more have been done before), it's very cool to have it in my pocket, as it were, and I'm going to keep Allo installed for now just to see where the Google Assistant goes.

Really wish I could handle SMS messaging from within Allo so I wouldn't have to switch between apps to talk to people. It's bad enough that my colleagues use WhatsApp and two groups of my friends use Slack and Facebook Messenger, respectively.

I really don't understand Duo though. It's a nice little app and also nice to have a cross-platform alternative to FaceTime (which I've never used precisely because the majority of my friends do not use Apple devices) but Hangouts did video already, why not just rebuild Hangouts from scratch as Duo and Allo in one app?

Yes, I realise this is the question that has been on everyone's lips and has been asked many times before and after the launch of these apps. I've still yet to see a sensible answer though.

I regularly show people Google Photos and shout at them DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW INCREDIBLE THIS IS? IT KNOWS WHAT "FOOD" MEANS IN BASICALLY ANY VARIATION YOU CAN THINK OF!

My favorite "this shouldn't be possible" searches are food, flowers, sunsets, dogs, (to which it returned a picture of my dog's BUTT in the dog door. No face. No paws. Just a butt with tail sticking out) Christmas (to which it returned a photo of my wife, taken in July, at Bronner's Christmas Village in Michigan, etc.

It's completely incredible how accurate it is, and it's transformed the way I access and use my photos. I still cannot get over how "food" can mean literally millions of things and it will show me plates, people eating, food on a table, food in a takeout container, individual ingredients, food being cooked, etc. Those are all so dramatically different that the fact it's able to return them so accurately boggles my mind.

It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS.

With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison. When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these days.

I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of incorporating these features into one of their existing applications.

It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.

For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising.

And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.

The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.

Trying to chat with others I find difficult. Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. In fact many of my techie friends, two of which worked at Google, are not even on it and it doesn't work with any of Google's existing chat apps. So I have to go out of my way to try to get friends on it.

Nope. Too much friction. Gave up. The AI is okay but didn't seem much better than, say, Google Now. So I didn't really understand why I would even use it.

Dou is kinda the same way and I really wish they would have combined them. You could even let the AI work in the video mode and if it overheats something it can add information.

I believe it IS Google Now, I think it's been rebranded as Google Assistant. The only difference is that it's directly in your chats with other people like a third person.

Compared to Google Now, Google Assistant is more conversational. So it basically does: commands, trivia, funny chat replies and when it doesn't know what to do, web search.

I checked and it doesn't do common sense judgements. "What is heavier, a dog or an elephant?" -> returns web search

Also, doesn't find conditional references. "What is the population of the city I am currently in?"

> Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much.

Doesn't it send them a text with a link to get allo? I'm certain it sent my wife a text like this.

yep it does that why I instantly uninstalled !

Oh. Two of my friends said they got nothing so I assumed it did not. Now I don't know what happened there. Honestly I'm torn, too, as that seems like it would be necessary but also annoying. Sigh.

Seeing as Hangouts is becoming worse and worse and worse(recent update removed tabs on the bottom of the screen, now it's all in a single window - and I get notifications in the corner of the screen with the full content of each message - really awkward if I'm in a meeting. In the old version, a tab would light up green and that was it. But the absolute worst offence is that there is no way to go back to the old interface - google took the executive decision to break it for everyone, so they did, I'm really pissed off about it), I would really like to switch to a different IM. Allo would be nice, if not for the fact that it doesn't have a desktop client. That's unacceptable.

I'm finding the auto responses suggested by Allo to be pretty creepy. They are just close enough to what I would type to tempt me to save time by clicking on them. But they aren't actually the words I would choose myself. Yet the recipient thinks these words are mine. So Google is subtly modifying the very language used by billions of people. Shades of Newspeak.

You are already selecting precanned phrases in your mind most of the time, this just visualizes it. You still can cognitively work harder to write a new phrase, this just let's your instinctual responses come out faster.

Yes. It would be nice if allo visually marked the canned responses on the receiving end.

I see a lot of people asking why not club this feature (and Duo) into Hangouts. I use Hangouts too, but it looks like they'd grown too complicated for a common user who wanted to 'just' do a quick text chat or a quick video chat. Hangouts had chat, SMS, video, phone calling and what not. While I didn't see any problem at all with that and found that good (except the UI that was still not good), probably it's a little daunting for some people.

I still wish what others are wishing here, that there is a unified app which just does all these things nicely with enough simplicity.

What I find useful about Hangouts is SMS history backups. Android should backup SMSes when moving to a new phone.

You can ask @Google assistant to set a reminder, check your emails, draft and send email to your contacts, share your location(in group). You can summon @Google in your group chats. So far it is certainly an interesting toy.

You can also do all of these things with the Google app, with the exact same inputs. I had a full conversation with Allo that I repeated verbally after saying "Ok Google" and the results were identical.

Can you check your emails with 'OK Google'? I use my Android phone as a satnav, and it would be really helpful on the commute to get it to read me the at least the subject lines of my inbox, I can't seem to make it do anything other than Google "Read my unread emails".

That's certainly my biggest disappointment so far with the Google Assistant, even though I understand that they will improve it with time. I wish it was at least better integrated within the Google ecosystem, so that I can interrogate it regarding my emails, my calendar or my contacts. Why can't I reference a friend using their google+ handle? Or ask for my next dentist appointment that's on my calendar? Or my last amazon order receipt in my mails? Hopefully stuff like that will come and it will make the Assistant a bit more useful and less gimmicky.

"Show my next flight to Melbourne" and "show my last Deliveroo email receipt" both are working for me.

Agreed. But I prefer text interface over voice. Having @Google assistant in group chat is kind of creepy but still interesting. It can share my location to the group, show weather and other search results. I wish Google assistant can setup group reminders(now it does not). It is certainly already replaced my Google search.

When the AI ends up showing me a Google search, it's kind of disappointing. If I wanted to do a Google search, I'd do it myself instead of adding the step of asking the AI to search it for me.

Having tried it out, I'm more than a little puzzled. What I don't understand is why make this yet another new platform, instead of just adding it as a new feature to hangouts?

All they've done is introduce friction to the onboarding process.

Unless I'm really missing something here. As the linked article says, Google already has our contacts, and they already have a list of the people we chat with, etc. Why not just make use of this instead of asking everyone to start from scratch again?

If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you:

GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use.

Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText.

Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

So, what I would LOVE is something like GMail for texting... i.e., GText.

- Almost unlimited storage in the cloud so I can keep all my old texts.

- Access to all my texts via a web browser.

- Search through all my old texts with powerful Google Search.

- Never lose old texts just because I changed my phone.

- All the cool GMail features such as Labels and Filters, and colors for labels.

Doesn't this basically exist in Google voice? I've been using it for 6+ years and it's a great (albeit free) service.

You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0].

It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS, without a proxy!

Hopefully this small project will take off and eventually become bigger than Allo.

0. http://hangouts.google.com

Plus for the most part if people are still on gChat it uses that.

I have no idea why the cool parts of allo aren't just a feature of chats in Hangouts.

I use and love Hangouts for this exact reason. I haven't found anything that can do the IM+Voice+SMS combo crossplatform.

I don't get why Google isn't pressing Hangouts hard vs. letting it languish. It really should be a core product that ties everything together. Unified contacts, instant communications of all varieties, whether SMS, IM, voice, video...

Since it hasn't got an update in forever, the UI is crappy, and they've turned off all API access and denied people writing third party clients.

I now wish there was an alternative, but I haven't found anything that does it all.

Why, Google, Why!?!?

> It stores your texts in the cloud forever

It does? Are we talking about SMS here? Last time I checked Hangouts certainly did not sync SMS messages. A real shame because I miss that functionality sorely when switching between devices.

It does if you use Google Voice or Google Fi.

And you can use it in your browser!

Little known? You must be kidding. It has more than 1 Billion installations [0].

It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse.

The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account, needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat.

On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well).

As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though, we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations).

The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :)"

[0]: https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE

The parent comment was being sarcastic.

I just tried it out. Despite of using GMail for years, I didn't know Google had created hangouts.google.com. :-)

Just tried it out and to my disappointment, it doesn't allow me to send a file other than images to other users. Google engineers if you are listening please add the ability to send docs and files to other users!

Presumably this is because they don't want hangouts to become a de facto file sharing service, by the fact that the person you're messaging could be offline and you might expect the content to be archived/re-downloadable. The fact that pictures are shareable is (I think) because they do/can put the pictures into a google photos gallery.

What you probably want to do is put it in google drive and then share a link in hangouts.

(Not a googler)

It lacks integration with SMS though.

GText will integrate SMS and all in-house Google instant-messaging/texting modalities.

I use an app that backs up all my SMS/MMS onto Gmail (SMS Backup+). It labels them accordingly and separates them by contact. The downside is that MMS are put on a separate conversation and conversations are limited to 100 messages. But the import process puts them all neatly back onto the phone (except MMS). I don't often have to check for old emails so I don't re-import all the texts when I switch phones, the web interface suffices.

It also puts all calls as a calendar event (including length) and entry in the conversations. I find this feature very useful.

You can get your old texts via encrypted backup.

Apple doesn't store them server side. It's not a migration issue.

Which is why I wrote "idiot-proof". Things such as "encrypted backup" and "server side" are difficult to parse when I'm under the pressure of changing a phone. Plus, Apple has a bad enough reputation as it is (with cloud / syncing). I want my old texts to reappear magically without having to know these complicated sounding concepts. GMail does that. GText would if Google created it along similar lines.

It would be nice to have an option to move them between phones without relying on restoring the iTunes or iCloud backup of a previous device. I just got my new 7+ on Thursday and as with every new device I get I was keen to just start from a clean slate (my home screen on my 6+ was a mess and instead of cleaning it up I just decided it would be easier to start from square one, all my photos were already on my iCloud photo library and all my music on Apple Music) - annoyingly enough while a large chunk of my core experience was migrated over messages were not.

Now, considering iMessage uses E2E encryption and they don't store any of this data outside of your iCloud backup I'm not shocked, but considering I already get notified that iMessage was set up on another device and the public key is sent to Apple so new messages can be encrypted with it I don't see why my existing device couldn't just "catch-up" the new one like Skype used to do before they moved message history server-side.

Everything you just described is a complete privacy nightmare.

At this stage, I've given up caring about my privacy :-)

Not sure what's going on with your use of the iPhone.

Every iPhone user has an iCloud account which almost all are backing up to right now. So when you change phone you just need to do a Restore from iCloud and all of your messages will just be there. I would consider it pretty idiot proof.

For starters, iCloud has a 5GB limit (free tier). And that limit has been used up by lots of other things in addition to iMessages.

iCloud backups are also known to fail. Someone I know just can't get the backup to work on their iPhone.

Most of the drawbacks of iCloud have been totally overcome years ago, and 5Gb is totally sufficient since only personal data is backed up, media file (music,video,Apps) are not.

Go to the next Apple Store and enjoy a free unlimited in time support for theses issues.

Every time I came by a Genius Bar for support I have witness "dumbs" users crying tears of joy after an epic data recovery thanks to the dumb-proof iCloud backup (and that exactly why both my parents are backed up on iCloud, for some people "dumb-proofness" is more important than privacy concerns)

>And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

curious: How do you change phones? I have never lost any messages in iMessage when I was moving between phones.

> Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

Funny, cause Xiaomi has this working fine. I've changed device not long ago and it freaked me out a little.

"than again", I'm going to blame Emacs...

Looking forward to v2 which adds multilingual (French & German) support, codenamed 'Allo 'Allo

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