Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything Else on Their Phone
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This is not a problem the average user is having. Anyone remember the "IM wars"? Most people happily installed all IM programs their friends were on, thus solving the problem. Only a small handful of nerds thought this was intolerable, and installed Adium or Trillian or Miranda or any of the other multi-network instant messengers, and suffered every time an actual network would upgrade or change their protocol.
This time around, people's smartphones are already the unifier. All messaging apps have notifications, so your phone will tell you what everyone is saying across networks, and you just tap to go straight into whatever app the message was in.
After unifying messaging, we want to continue to unify other functionalities, to work toward a sort of 'super app'. It starts with messaging and will evolve from there.
What will you do when the underlying networks start to work against you and shut your third-party client out? They don't want you on their network, they don't want people to use your client, they want people on their client, so they get all the metrics and data.
Look, I had a multi-network IM client for a long time, because screen real estate and notification area icon space was limited, and it was nice to have similar-looking dialog boxes for everyone. But those aren't problems on mobile.
I get it, it would be nice to have the app that everyone has installed, but what problem are you solving for average people? Why would they install your thing and not the real thing?
Instagram and Snapchat are out for the first round. The workaround is going to be too great, so those will come in version 2 as we scale our dev efforts. FB Messenger is the one we are going to put our effort into and work around the API. We will have the bare bones to begin, very basic photo and video options. The basic idea for us is to get to a minimal viable product, see if what we are doing makes sense, and then either grow from there or pivot.
There is no doubt at some point we will get a cease and desist, much like Disa did. We are full aware there will be a day when that happens. At that point, we will discontinue their serves and continue using the other ones. The goal for us is to eventually be our own standalone product.
The real problem people are running into is app overload. It isn;t just messaging, but rather apps in general. By unifying messaging first, we can move on to unifying the next thing from there and eventually having one big super app!
Thanks for your questions and feedback, they are honestly super helpful for me to talk through.
Honestly, they don't. In your previous post you went through your scenario of having to check a bunch of apps. You are a developer, not a typical user, so the typical user has way less. Also, all apps have notification icons, so you don't have to open them to figure out if there's anything there, you can take one glance at a screen on your phone, and you know which three had something. Or take a look at the notification area in your phone, which has the same info.
You're building an app for yourself, great! But you have to realize that everyone is not you. :-)
I also appreciate you reading the few post I have put out here. I am on a bit of a tear writing lately as part of a new year resolution to write more and improve my writing. I figured I might as well couple it with my little project.
Anyways, I am fully aware this app won't apply to everyone. The way I look at it is not everyone uses so many social networks that they can't handle posting to all of them right? While this might not seem like a huge problem, Hootsuite solved for it and now they are a unicorn.
I get this is a problem me and a few other people have right now, but I believe it is going to get worse. There will be an app after Snapchat, then after that, and the apps will continue to pile up. As for notification, we have some things in the pipeline to improve over messaging experaince as well.
If I backtrack just a bit, I am actually more of a swiss army knife position who works at a startup. Mainly I do customer service and data analysis though.
Thanks for your input!
I think you can go even further and say that having different apps for different types of communications is actually a convenience in the context of something like a smartphone. Different apps implicitly cater to a different circle of contacts with distinct levels of privacy, discretion, formality and posterity. If you had to explicitly manage these types of preferences in a single universal app it would be both tedious and error prone. Having separate apps that work is specific ways is just so much simpler to manage, it is convention over configuration.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think you're missing the point here. Users may like having separate tools to help them differentiate between different communication tasks. I don't think that trying to manage a bunch of messaging apps is a pain point for most/all people.
If it isn't a pain point already, then by definition you're solving a problem that isn't there.
It is because the user ends up having to look at notifications of multiple applications. Those notifications take up space.
Right now they're sorted in a way. For example, the way the lockscreen looks, or the time they've arrived. This doesn't necessarily reflect priority for the user. How to achieve this? I think the correct way is by ML/AI. One way could be looking at which notifications the user tends to open first. Or, for example, look at which correspondence appears to be most used. This could even be combined with other factors such as time of the day, day of the week. E.g. the wife might be less important during 9-5 at a weekday.
Moreover, to reply to your specific point, a user could decide to user Ulum, plus Signal on the side. Or a user could decide decide to run Ulum, MSN Messenger, and ICQ. My point being, an application can abstract some of the protocols but just because it can't do more doesn't mean the user will use that feature. This is entirely up to the user.
Right, everything is entirely up to the user.
Here is what they said:
Aside from a few janky integrations caused by BB10 emulating Android for done apps, the hub in BB10 was pretty much flawless. BlackBerry are way underrated for the attention they put into UI/UX, especially when it comes to productivity. The same can’t be said for the BlackBerry hub on Android, it’s a long way from the polish of its BB10 counterpart.
My main gripe with the Android version is that for anything other than email, it basically serves as a second notification area; pressing a twitter notification in the hub, for instance, just opens the Twitter app. This is pretty redundant given that Android already has perfectly reasonable notification area. So much so that I’ve removed everything but my email accounts from the BlackBerry hub on Android, and now use it simply as an email client. I will say that it’s by far the best email client I’ve used in Android, and I’ve tried most of them.
For the BlackBerry hub, or UNUM, to truly fulfill its promise, the third party integrations need be to be self-contained (don’t just open another app for me) and feature rich enough to negate the need for me to keep the standard client installed (or at least rich enough for me to turn off notifications on the standard client).
So the real challenge here becomes creating a UI/UX that is consistent across your app but also consistent with the wide variation of UIs/UXs across the third party apps you integrate with.
It was really sad, because as a Windows Phone user, I loved finally having a phone on par with Android & iOS with: Cortana, improved browser, action center, Swype, etc. I just hated that they also removed all the things that made it better than Android & iOS.
In the end, I decided I'd be better off just getting an Android, then switched to iOS. I still miss the things my Windows Phone did better (messaging and sync).
First, there was ICQ and AIM. ICQ got bought by AOL, and they added compatibility between each protocol.
Then there is Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) for desktop OSes (Windows/Linux/macOS). Adium is a macOS version of Pidgin, and Bitlbee is an IM to IRC gateway fork of Pidgin. Which means you would be able to access it with your favourite IRC client (possibly with the aid of Tmux/Screen). There were tons and tons of plugins for all these applications available, adding all kind of features, including adding of protocol support. I remember even different versions of protocols being supported. There was even a Skype plugin for Pidgin.
But Skype didn't quite like that plugin. Which brings me to a point: you may end up with fierce opposition from the developers or owners of the official clients, for a myriad of (valid & less valid) reasons. Using Pidgin with ICQ meant less advertisement income for Mirabilis/AOL (the ads were shown when a user would message another, in the message box). Skype/Microsoft doesn't like usage of unofficial clients. Moxie Marlinspike wants people to download the official Signal client from Google Play, and he doesn't want third party clients to use the Signal infrastructure. WhatsApp sued the maker of an unofficial client. Bnetd got taken down [1]. Unofficial KaZaA clients. Really, I'm digressing from IM now. The stories are endless.
Then there is Jabber or XMPP. This had backwards compatibility with previous protocols. Then there were clients which were basically a frontend for those protocols. An outstanding one was Nimbuzz.
I completely and undoubtedly agree with everything you are saying, but just because it hasn't been done before doesn't mean it can't.
We are fully aware there will be a day where we have to stand on our own tow feet, and we will be ready when that day comes.
Option number on is we release a free version with limited capabilities and a upgradable version from $.99-$4.99. This isn't the desirable route because the more users we have on our network, the better it will work. We want to encourage anyone and everyone to join.
Option number 2 (the route we will take) will mainly consist of monetizing businesses who want to use the platform. Much like Snapchat, this will consist of sponsored content, geo options, and other business-centric features. This option will require us to scale quickly, but I am pretty sure it is the route we are going to take.
For the first few months we are going to bootstrap it and focus on user experience and not focus on monetizing users at all. As we scale and grow our user base we can start focusing on things like that.
I think we all agree with that.
A high churn rate is bad for federation - federation requires a spec, and specs are like unit tests. You don't want to write them in the experimentation phase before you know what you're building.
Over time the churn will slow down (this is happening already) and we'll probably see a standardish set of decent messaging features that everyone wants. (Good notifications, emoji, photos, low battery consumption, e2e encryption and obviously a gif keyboard.)
When we know what we want it shouldn't be too hard to write a spec and start drumming up interest in some decent opensource federated servers and clients. Signal might be a great place to start - but I think we should wait another year or two. Even signal isn't stable enough yet.
(And no, this hasn't happened yet with XMPP. XMPP has, for a variety of reasons completely failed. We need to let it die and start from scratch with something actually designed with mobile devices in mind)
[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.
Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.
I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)
Incredible insights on companies fighting for market share. This is leading to all of the innovation now, and soon the dust will settle. At which point, we can sweep in and offer something unique to the common user!
If you feel (as I do) that they haven't sufficiently adapted to the current era, why do you think any other open protocol would be able to change more easily?
I don't care about stickers, emoticons, videos or anything else.
I know apps exist that do this now, but this needs to be the default behavior and there should be an open standard for achieving this. It's 2017, we should've had this in 1998.
If I can't have something like this soon, then I'll make it myself.
As for ads, we aren't entirely sure. We could make the app 99 cents and have no ads, or we could have a few ads or maybe both. I am not sure yet.
Either way, I really appreciate the feedback and would love to hear if you had any more suggestions!
Taking about messaging on phones without even mentioning SMS, seems uninformed to me.
The idea is this breaks down the barrier to entry to start incorporating multiple unifications. For example, we start with messaging and next we unify emails. From there we unify live streaming, and then something else. I am not saying these are the things we are going to go on to unify, but that is the concept.
You can't. These apps don't federate, and not everyone uses all of them.
As I wrote this comment, I realized I use more apps than I thought.
I use SMS for some folks, Messenger for others, and Slack, Hangouts, and GroupMe for specific groups.
If I'm in a 5+ person group chat, I can't really ask everyone to move to something else. And I want to hear what's going on, so I keep the app around.
These are also all the people who have at least a thousand unread emails in their inboxes. I know one person who has roughly 60k unread emails dating back to 1997 when she created her AOL account. She is not a Luddite and very good at using other types of tech but somehow never mastered email.
There is no doubt, people are going to struggle heavily to catch on to messaging. People seem to just now be getting social media (which is why it is dying) and now they have to adjst to messaging.
I agree with what you said about Tweetdeck, but what we are trying to do is more of a Tweetdeck / Hootsuite hybrid.
I am currently in the early stages of development for my unified messaging platform, which I have named UNUM messenger. I plan to launch UNUM messenger in March of 2017 as a Beta. If you would like to be notified when UNUM messenger launches, you can sign up here - http://www.unummessenger.com
More than anything, I am looking for feedback on what people would want to see on an app like this. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Thanks! Peter
I don't know who you are or why I should care what you are developing? People have known that messaging has been fucked for a very long time, and many people have tried to make a one size fits all solution for messaging.
What makes you different?
In a related tangent, Messaging is really fucked. Email is thrashed. To the point that it requires consistent effort and continuous maintenance for it to be useful at all.
I love the idea of a unified service. But I don't know why facebook or skype or slack would ever give up a customer to your interface?
To be honest, I am not necessarily asking for you to care about what I am doing. What I am looking for is constructive feedback, which you provided me in your comment, so thank you!
What makes us different is we are not only going to unify, but also provide native messaging through our app. For this reason, we will introduce features that set us apart solely for being a native messaging app.
I agree email is basically useless at this point. Later down the road, we do have plans to have our app help in the overthrowing of email and eventually replacing it with messaging. You can read more about that here if you would like - https://artplusmarketing.com/can-messaging-replace-email-a83...
Some apps we definitely won't be able to integrate with. We will need to start lean and work from there meaning only having a handful of integrations to begin. From there we will be able to get a bigger dev team and work around API limitations.
I really apprecaite you responding and all of your feedback!
Hmmm... needs editing.
Thanks for the feedback, I just updated it now! :)
That is simply not true. Messaging apps allow people to hide behind screens, to avoid facing their fears and are killing real communication.
While this is true, I feel it is also true that people are scared of face-to-face communication. Hell I couldn't take to a girl face to face until high school and even then I struggled, but truth be told - I could text like a boss.
Whether it hurt real communication or not is a debate, but either way messaging is going to happen.
You are totally right, messaging is going to happen. It is even better for me.
And I have a lot of f2f discussions about this, even if I know that most people feel being offended by my opinion.
It would be nothing short of a sin to not show my gratitude to everyone who shares their valuable time with me.
I respect your opinion and you have every write to feel the way you do. With that being said, responding is something I want to do.
A face-to-face conversation would be entirly different, but that's the beauty of the internet right?!
Feedback is really important to me. I truly enjoy communicating with people. I gain something from every single conversation I have.