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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Not that I’m defending Allo, but I don’t know how useful your distinction is. What is an earnest product then?

Any product released by a company that has bills to pay is released to “get market share”.

Google was clearly not strategically invested in Allo; as it was one of at least five messaging products? Duo, Allo, Hangouts, SMS app, the carrier RCS BS. As a consumer, when i see that, I know Google isn't going to continue doing all of those in two to three years, but I don't know which one they're going to keep, and it's not worth my social capital to get enough of my friends onboard to try it.

I think they mean it was a “me too” product. “Everybody’s using their messaging app. That should be us! Let’s make a new messaging app and take over that market.”

As opposed to a really new and innovative product (e.g. the iPhone) or at least one that’s a notable improvement over existing similar ones (Gmail).

It’s a spectrum rather than a hard and fast distinction, of course.

In this context, an earnest product could be a messaging product that aimed to solve a problem with other existing products and had a coherent story explaining this.

Allo from the outside seemed to solve no problem other than "people are using messaging platforms that aren't ours".

I assumed GP meant that there's nothing in it for the user, only for the company.

Other examples include carrier-branded apps that come preinstalled on phones.

Exactly this.

An earnest product is one that succeeds after a year or two, and the non-earnest are the ones that fail, duh!

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