Bye bye Reply: Google is burying yet another promising app

When Google isn’t launching phones with enormous notches, or leaking internal memos of its struggles with censorship, it’s killing promising apps and services that heaps of users love.

The latest victim? Reply.

A lesser known app in the Google stable, Reply was a smart notification app that could either respond to messages itself, or prompt the user to select from a number of AI-enriched and contextually aware replies. It was particularly useful for travellers, as Reply could sense when its master was in a car, walking or cycling and notify the messager accordingly.

It didn’t just serve Google messaging apps either. WhatsApp, Twitter, and Slack were also supported.

In an email sent to users of the app, Google’s Area 120 team thanked those for testing its “experiment”.

“As you know, Reply was an experiment, and that experiment has now ended. While it might still work for the next few months, you may encounter bugs, or see that the suggestions aren’t as good,” the team continued.

But not all is lost. Area 120 noted that “the ideas and learnings from Reply will live on in other Google products”. And, if you’re lucky to have Android 9.0 Pie installed on your device, you might’ve noticed some of Reply’s savvy built into Google’s messaging apps.

Nevertheless, it is a blow for those running older phones with dated versions of Android.

From now on, you’ll have to reply to messages yourself. What. A. Chore.

Feature image: Andy Walker/Memeburn