With Google Allo, you can have a private chat with a contact — now, don’t ask us about a group private chat please! It’s called Incognito chat — the term clearly borrowed from Google’s own Chrome browser — and you can even set the private chat’s expiry time, after which it will be automatically deleted.
Note that the expiry time is set for the individual chat message — whether that be media or simple text — and not for the chat window itself. For more on this, see the section below titled ‘How Google Allo chat expires in Incognito mode’.
Let’s see how to start a secret chat in Google Allo, that would expire automatically at given time.
- Open Google Allo.
- Click on the circular button at bottom right (resembles conversation or messaging icon).
- Tap on ‘Start incognito chat’ option, 2nd from top.
- Choose your contact with whom you wanna start the chat. Either search or tap on the person’s name in the list provided.
- Change expiry time: By default, the expiry date is set to 1 hour, tap on the ‘time icon’ at the right top (left to profile icon), to get the list of expiry options. You have options ranging from 5 seconds to indefinite. For the latter, you have to select ‘Off’.
Also read: How to send larger sized text in Google Allo
How Google Allo chat expires in Incognito mode
As we said above, you can set the expiry time for chats in Incognito mode. But that expiry time doesn’t applies to all messages in that Incognito chat, but only to individual text/media messages, which will be automatically deleted as per expiry time set at the moment of sending.
For example, if you set the expiry time to 1 day, then it will apply to all messages sent thereafter, and not before. So, if you send a message ‘hello’ now, then it will last for 1 day in that chat window.
However, if you change the expiry time to 10 seconds thereafter, and send another message ‘hello again’, then you ‘hello again’ message will last for about 10 seconds, and will be deleted automatically thereafter. Now, your hello message will still be there, because it will expire only after 1 day (and not 10 seconds even when later chats with 10 seconds expire time will be deleted).
