Did you hear? Google is releasing yet another unified messaging app at I/O this year, and is sunsetting the Allo app announced in 2016! How crazy is that?! Does anyone at that company have any clue what they are doing?!?!1!ONE?!!

Lets all take a deep breath for a moment and catch up.

Thanks to some absolutely stellar reporting from The Verge, we know Google is finally ready to admit its messaging strategy has not gotten better over the last couple of years. To attack this problem head on, Google appointed the guy who has been steering the Good Ship Photos into its place of dominance. The plan as it stands right now is to finish something Google started back in 2013, which is kill SMS once and for all. Instead of creating a new app and politely asking people to sign up for it, Google is pumping features into the text messaging app you already have on your phone and asking all of the carriers to support a unified approach to non-SMS messaging.

It's not exciting. It's not flashy, and it has nothing to do with competing against Apple's iMessage platform. And I'm pretty sure that's why it is going to work.

Here's the thing about SMS messaging - it's awful. On a technical level SMS messaging is deeply flawed. It was never actually intended to be a mass consumer messaging tool, and several mobile network engineers I've spoken to over the years have openly mocked it for being held together with the software equivalent of paper clips and bubble gum. It's expensive to maintain, and was never meant to be relied on in the ways it is today. The carriers have wanted a viable replacement to SMS for a long time now, but instead of building public alternatives, Google and Apple created platforms limited to Google or Apple login requirements. Apple has been a great deal more successful that Google with its messaging platform, but the underlying problems have not gone away.