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Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

Good luck to the author. I used to love in my windows phone 7 back in 2010 when I could combine text, fb messenger, Skype, etc. into one thread. With the people hub you would also see the Facebook and Twitter feed for a particular contact in one place. The support for fb messenger disappeared for some reason, as well as Twitter feed I think, I hope the author takes a look at this as part as a prior art investigation. All friends that used it really liked it. This is one of the big reasons I'm sad windows phone never took off.

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A little bit of functionality (and a lot of speed) was lost with the move to 8, but then all the unique things about Windows Phone (hubs in particular) were killed around 8.1.

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).

I myself have always been an iOS guy, but I can understand your pain from the transition from 7 to 8!

There is tons of prior art.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

The odds seems to be stacked up against me...

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.

What I am saying is that it has been done before. I'm just stating some of the hurdles. If you can license or otherwise come to agreement, avoid those hostile protocols (know before you do a lot of work who/what is a hostile), or just make a plugin implementation and host the 'dark' plugin on Tor or w/e you should be fine.

I totally agree and am grateful for all of your feedback!

You're welcome. I got one question for you btw. I take it you work for-profit. How do you plan on making money with your product?

Great question! This has been something we have really struggled with. We want to be as user-friendly as possible and to so we need to give some things up. We aren't going to store messages, blast ads, or anything intrusive like that. For this reason, we have a few options.

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.

Blackberry hub was great for combining all the messaging systems, easily the best thing that came out of BB10 (and proper app permissions). I would try the android port, but all my family have ios devices and we use mainly use facetime.

BB10 seriously rocks! There are some functionality things I have had people tell me could be improved.

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.

Thanks for the feedback! We are early in development, so every little feedback helps us with the direction we take. We will definitely take your feedback into consideration. This messaging hub we are creating should be able to do all of the things you previously loved about your windows phone!

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