It can’t be long before ’s forthcoming messaging app, lo, hits the ay Store. Not only has there been a deluge of leaks from Android lice, which has been dishing out details of an internal preview build, but video chat app Duo launched last Tuesday.
That makes us feel like Tuesday, August 23rd may be a good day to release lo into the wild. Here’s a roundup of everything we know so far about ’s next bold leap into messaging.
The story behind the story: showed off lo at its I/O conference in May, promising that the Assistant a ton of new features would make it the must-have messaging app. ke Duo it will work on both Android iOS, which may help ease the ease your green bubble problem with those ione-toting friends.
Search away
One peculiarity of Hangouts is that you can’t search through your conversations in the app (instead you have to do it through Gmail on the desktop). lo fixes this annoyance with search that not only will find your conversations, but also locate the Assistant’s answers.
Android lice Search will play a major role in lo.
This should be a significantly more powerful way to locate that address you need or restaurant you chatted about last week.
To sync or not to sync
One peculiarity that the Android lice team found was that lo may not backup your chat history. evious chats disappeared when reinstalling the app on the same or a new phone.
Android lice en reinstalling lo some of the conversations didn’t appear, even on the same phone.
The current build seems to forget one-on-one chats, group chat, Assistant conversations, media files. rhaps this is something specific to the test build, but it’ll be worth noting if lo is designed to be intentionally forgetful in this manner in order to ramp up security.
Disappearing messages
lo is bringing in a couple of drops of Snapchat into the app. It appears you’ll be able to set specific expirations for messages so they can disappear five seconds, a minute, an hour, or even a week while using an Incognito mode.
Android lice Keep your chats private with the Incognito mode.
You also can’t screenshot these chats they’re end-to-end encrypted. Messaging is a major focus of privacy concerns, so this could make lo more appealing to those who don’t want their conversations to end up anywhere else.
Some weird stickers
Stickers are all the rage in messaging apps, lo tries to join in with the fun. There’s a sticker pack, though some of the choices are…interesting.
Android lice lio the Bull is one of many sticker packs to be available in lo.
If you’re not the type that wants to get too zany with your chats you can safely ignore this section, but you have to give some credit to whomever came up with lio the Bull.
Say it with a GIF
You can easily share GIFs annotate on images that you share through lo. It should be smoother than MMS, which sometimes can get slow depending on your cell signal.
Android lice Sometimes words won’t do, so you can share your thoughts with an image or GIF.
The report says media compression is put to use for images videos, but the image quality has still been pretty solid throughout testing.
Speak say
There’s voice messaging, according to the leaks the interface is rather similar to how this works in atsApp even iMessage.
Android lice The voice messaging feature will look very familiar for those who have tried this out with atsApp.
You’ll be able to tap hold the microphone, with the blue bubble indicating that you’re recording. fting your finger finishes sends the message.
The exhaustive leaks tell us the app is just about ready to go, so don’t be surprised if it drops very soon.
