Google Allo's best new feature is privacy

Allo comes with a bunch of interesting and fun features: it supports emoji, stickers and a new Whisper Shout feature (you can control the size of the font, go small to wshisper and big to shout), but also supports automatic replies and integrates the new smart Google Assistant.

Those are all great features, but in a world of increasing government surveillance, there is one other feature about Allo that we're particularly excited about: privacy.

Experts say even Telegram and other popular messaging apps are not fully secure

There are quite a few messengers these days that claim to offer private and secure messaging. The most popular is likely Telegram, an app developed by Pavel Durov, the creator-in-exile of Russia's most popular social network, VKontakte. After the government basically forced Durov out of his own company in order to have full control over the precious data that users generate in the social network, Durov moved out of the country and started work on Telegram. Unfortunately, from a cryptographic point of view, the agreement is that Telegram is not secure: it requires a phone number to register, uses a custom protocol rather than an open one (which is seen as a weakness in crypto circles), it collects tons of metadata and can gather the information about your connections on its servers.