Google is working on a new social app for small groups to edit photos together
While Google continues to add more features to its two social communication apps Allo and Duo, TechCrunch has learned that it has quietly been working on least one more social app.
Context & Ripple Effects
This isn't Google's first swing at the small-group format: in May 2016 it launched Spaces, an app built around group sharing on any topic, so the reported photo-editing app reads as a narrower second attempt at the same audience. It arrives while Allo and Duo are still being actively extended — Allo 11 added group QR codes and an APK teardown hinted at Duo calls living inside Allo — meaning Google is running multiple overlapping social surfaces at once.
The arc matters because the corpus shows where these experiments tend to land: by late 2017 Google was testing throwaway photography apps like Storyboard, Scrubbies, and Selfissimo!, and two years after this report it shipped a native chat feature inside Google Photos. A standalone group-editing app fits that pattern of seeding social-photo behavior in side projects before deciding whether to absorb it.
First-order effects
- Users of Allo and Duo gain a potential third standalone destination for small-group interaction, splitting attention across apps that are themselves beginning to borrow each other's features.
- Google's own Photos team faces internal overlap: a dedicated group-editing app would duplicate capabilities the Photos product could host directly, as its later chat rollout demonstrated.
Second-order effects
- If the app ships, it forces Google to choose between maintaining yet another social surface and folding its best mechanics into Photos — the same consolidation pressure that ended up putting chat inside Photos rather than a separate messenger.
- The experiment joins a growing portfolio of small photography tests (Storyboard, Scrubbies, Selfissimo!), effectively turning app-store launches into A/B labs whose results determine which features graduate to Google's main products.
Third-order effects
- Google's repeated pattern — Spaces for group sharing, Allo and Duo for messaging, a tested business communications suite, now a group-editing app — points toward a structural approach of running parallel social experiments with unclear long-term commitments, which risks fragmenting its user base and eroding trust that any given app will survive.
- If the seed-and-absorb cycle holds, the durable outcome is less a new social network than a steady migration of social-photo behaviors into Google Photos, concentrating the company's consumer photo-and-sharing strategy in one property.
The trend: Google treats social as a portfolio of disposable small-group experiments, with the surviving behaviors gradually absorbed into core products like Photos.