A CHAT APP WITH BENEFITS
Mobile chat is where it’s okay to be dumb. Your LinkedIn page may be a work of art wrought in HR-friendly prose; your tweets, so sharp you could shave with them. But texting? Let the autocorrect errors fly! Why punctuate? Isn’t that what old people do? In fact, why use words at all when any number of pictographic pokes, nods, and grunts available at the press of a button will get the job done faster? Blame the medium, says Jason Cornwell, the chief user experience designer behind Google’s communications apps. “Chat is inherently limited and low-bandwidth,” he says. It’s also here to stay: “Our phones are basically chat machines at this point. That’s the dominant activity that virtually everyone does on their phone.”
Allo, a mobile messaging app launched by Google in 2016, is the
