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Are we looking at the beginning of the end of Zello?

I pose the question because of the latest changes that Zello purposely put into place last week after the incident at the US Capitol.

A few days after that mess happened, Zello put out a message basically saying they were aware of some of those groups using Zello to orchestrate that event, and they were doing things to help keep Zello from becoming a tool for such events, such as removing channels and users dedicated to such movements.

Sure, OK... I can get behind that.

But, their next unspoken move was to make it hard to search for channels, WHILE disabling the channel share feature. All this coming a few months after other Free Zello features were recently stripped from the public.

So I recently asked Zello the following:

Dear Zello,

I've noticed the public channel search has been down for more than a week now on both the site and in the app.. And it looks deliberate. It's not exactly down, I've found the exact name would need to be entered and then you can find it. But I have noticed that the channel share link doesn't work right either. Basically takes you to zello in the play store.

Just curious, is the lifeline for the free service coming to an end in the near future? It's just starting to seem like Free Zello is slowly being dismantled.

• Trending list: R.I.P.

• Shared messages search: Hidden

• Ability to edit shared message titles: R.I P.

• Ability to delete shared messages: R.I.P.

• channel searching: broken?

• Channel sharing: broken?

Thanks,

Doug

And something else to add to that list is the fact that Zello support in the past has always answered every question of mine, and they answered each question in depth. I've always been impressed especially since I have never been a paying customer. However, the answers I've gotten from my last 2 inquiries were very vague. And this last answer was no different.

Here was their reply:

Zello Support, Jan 25, 2021, 10:08 CST:

Hi, Doug.

We disabled search channels feature. This decision was made for safety reasons.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

--Zello Support

Of course I still have questions:

1. Why cripple the channel search in the first place? Instead, why not just set up an automated keyword search on channels that would resemble such groups and automatically remove them? And to add to that, why not have 1 or 2 people designated at Zello to watch active channels for such activity?

2. Will the channel search and share features ever be restored as they were?

3. What about those other features I listed?

4. And what about the state of Free Zello? Are we looking at the beginning of the end? It's starting to feel that way.