Show HN: Tact – A simple chat app for iOS, iPadOS and macOS
justtact.com
justtact.com
So for quite a while, we had this joke, “we should make our own chat app”. Of course. That’s all it was, just a joke. But the thought kept nagging me until I did a thought experiment. “What if… it was not a joke?” What would it take? Knowing that I had no time and no money to put into it, what kind of chat app would and could I make? The thought experiment very quickly led me to iCloud that provides two vital services–users and backend.
So for past many months, we had a functional technical experiment of Tact trying to answer the question, is it possible to build Tact on iCloud like this? To date, I haven’t seen any evidence that it wouldn’t be possible.
That’s where Tact comes from. We realize there are many chat apps already out there. We aim to provide some extra choice and an option that we think should exist, but hasn’t. Here’s my subjective list of why I think Tact is different.
- Apple only.
- Straight from your device to iCloud. We never see your data.
- No ads. No data harvesting. No other weird shady things. Everything clean and honest, just as you see on our site.
- No new user account. You just use your iCloud account.
- No discovery. No one will bother you with unwanted “connection requests”.
- No private data access. We don’t ask for any data access on your device, or phone number, or anything.
- Great media experience. Share any media or files, even large. Neat web previews.
- Great desktop app.
- No funding. Completely bootstrapped indie for now. We only answer to our own conscience and personal savings. No pressure for quick growth.
Pros, Concerns, and Ideas:
First the pros:
(1)Your product looks clean.
(2)Your heart is definitely in the right place.
(3)I really like what you wrote in your posts here.
(4)It sounds like an experienced team that is passionate.
Concerns:
(1) Apple's 180 on respecting a user's endpoint security and privacy this year.
(2) Security conscious users might soon start migrating away from Apple.
(3) Hitching your boat to Apple locks out the vast majority of potential users.
(4) The landscape of chat apps in 2021 is way different than when Skype came about... Discord is a beast that was built on just MariaDB after a few months of development time and scaled to 100 million users, using only a few terrabytes of data before doing a major re-write of the code switching to Cassandra NoSQL. Your users value privacy? Give them a private cloud and allow them the option of getting away from a provider that compromises their endpoints...
Ideas:
(1) Dark mode. Look at Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost.
(2) Support for opensource, self-hosted clouds would give this app a reason to exist. Example -- Nextcloud integration or something as an alternative to iCloud...
(3) Maybe even sell the software as a completely self hosted, E2E thing using something akin to the OMEMO methods.
(4) Design / Designers could help with branding the product more.
Android users don't pay money.
That's a slight overgeneralization of course, but when you look at stats showing Android having a massively larger share of users than iOS, you need to realize the vast majority of the user base will not spend money on a service like this or any others for that matter.
If you narrow it down to people who regularly spend money on apps, iOS is clearly the platform to go with.
And using iCloud means one of the biggest dangers to their financial independence is gone: Having to pay for exponentially more storage to go with exponential growth.
Nitpick though, with:
> “Provably correct. We aim for our code to be provably correct; that is, covered by automated testing.”
Generally, ‘provably correct’ implies formal proofs e.g. ‘formal reasoning’, rather than test coverage.
”Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. Typical applications include the certification of properties of programming languages (e.g. the CompCert compiler certification project, the Verified Software Toolchain for verification of C programs, or the Iris framework for concurrent separation logic), the formalization of mathematics (e.g. the full formalization of the Feit-Thompson theorem, or homotopy type theory), and teaching.”
Jaanus, one of the founders of Tact also wrote a longer piece of what Tact is and is not — https://jaanus.com/tact-public-beta/
If so, I wonder if you'd get a warmer reception if you explained this. It's an interesting feature of iCloud that really isn't replicated anywhere else and is actually very cool.
I considered building an application like this awhile back when I realized how you could make the invitation links cleaner than the default ways iCloud handles it, but the landscape felt too crowded for one person. I like the design and approach though - good luck!
I agree it is an interesting feature, works well, and I wonder why aren’t more apps built with that. Perhaps one reason is that the developer experience is somewhat esoteric. It took me quite a while to figure out how it all works and how to put all the pieces together.
By the way, I actually open sourced my work on this some time ago: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/cloudkit-sane-sharing
I had a few members of the iCloud team reach out after that to see if I wanted to interview with them. Without saying too much, I think they definitely are aware it could be used more widely... such a shame, it's a very well designed system yet gets the blanket "it's custom Apple built so thus it's odd junk" label.
There's so many of them already, I have heavy app fatigue :) I would really want something that reduces the number of chat apps, not adds one. (Like Beeper and Element One are doing based on Matrix).
However I wish you luck! Hope it works out.
But later on in the same page, the following promise is made under the “Harm Reduction” section:
> Straight to Apple servers. Tact does not store your messages, files, photos, or any other data. They are stored only on Apple servers, and we as the makers of Tact have no access to them. We cannot provide your data to anybody even when requested or forced — we just don’t have it.
This part should have an asterisk and a link to the notifications section, since your systems will be able to see some metadata and data of the messages, and we don’t know how long that’s retained and what kind of backup systems those might end up in for a long duration.
There is no reason to have any faith in Apple's endpoint or cloud security.
Serious question, I can't fathom the reason for this.
'Tact is a chat app for families, friends, coworkers, or any other small closed groups of humans. Tact is based on iCloud and works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.' Messages.app does that.
'What can I do with Tact? Start private 1:1 and group chats with other people. Send long or short text messages. Send pictures and files. Like the messages and pictures that others have sent. See rich link previews. Communicate shared mood with chat emoji.' Messages.app does that.
'Values. The chat apps used in the western world today by most users are owned by Facebook, funded by advertising, and treating their users and their data as a product and resource to be harvested. We oppose that, and think there are other ways to enable our relations and communications that do not require compromising our integrity, harvesting our data, or funding the work from advertising.' Principles which are fully compatible with Messages.app
'Technology. Most communication apps are cross-platform, designed for the lowest common denominator in terms of both technology and privacy. We only have interest in the Apple platforms and ecosystem. We think there is a better way, and a higher bar.' Short sighted, and Messages.app does that.
'You are the customer. Unlike many apps that harvest user data for advertising and the advertiser pays, our real customer is you. There is no “advertiser” or anybody else in the model. You pay us for the product, and we are accountable only to you.' Messages.app does that.
I guess you get this one, partially: 'We don’t store or use your data. When you use Tact, your data moves from your device directly to Apple iCloud servers. We have no access to it, and thus no way or intent to use it to show you advertising, or do anything else with it.' Messages.app doesn't do that, but you never explain how I would get anyone I know to use this given the rest.
But you follow it with this: 'You say you store my content in Apple iCloud. Does that mean that I have to trust Apple? Yes.' Messages.app does that.
It probably sounds like I'm just being a negative jerk, but seriously, I cannot see anything about this that says "yes, try this". It feels like yet another "cool people whose podcasts you listen to are using this, you are missing out" kind of thing that will die, hard.
I think the greatest potential of this app thus far is that your development and especially overhead costs have been very low. You may be able to add some functionality that does differentiate it from iMessage and attract a user base.
I like the interface, especially the desktop one. It looks less like a messaging app and more like a note-taking or collaborative app, not sure if that indicates the direction you want to go.
I agree with your “note-taking or collaborative” sentiment. We aim to provide a different experience from many other chat apps. More… calm? Professional? Boring? Serious? Respectful? We haven’t quite figured out the adjectives, but yes, it is intentional.
Email can obviously cover that but is very multi-purpose and not necessarily ideal either.
Then there are apps like Slack or Discord, but those aren’t exactly the same either (and are server-based.)
Validation of new peers is a notoriously nasty usability issue. When both ends have access to the device contacts, then, in cases that matter the most (when people already know each other), it can be done transparently, because both sides will have each other on their contact lists. The friction is zero. No access to the contacts = the need to manually sort legit contact requests from spam. Hence the question. What is it like with Tact?
Also, as others have said, the fact that all goes through Apple makes Tact no different from iMessage. Perhaps I miss something obvious, but I literally see no reason to switch.
Additionally, taking Apple's privacy claims at their face value is a very naive thing to do, leave alone basing your product on them. At the very least whatever is getting stored in iCloud needs to be encrypted with the key that doesn't leave the device. That would make a good difference worthy of a switch - an iMessage clone running on Apple's infrastructure with Apple excluded from the loop.
This is also my answer to the validation of peers - it must happen out of band, outside of Tact. We currently don’t provide any answer to it in the product.
However, you maybe missed the message wars I, II, and III starting back in ~1997.
As an Android user and software dev, realize the biggest motivation would be to reduce friction across "borders".
The 2nd bone of contentiin is having 8 excited to pay and 2 whom do not. This goes back to the common denominator.
You must eliminate friction and while noble ideals, Telegram, Signal and others have a heck of a headstart even outside of iMessage.
As an idea...make it decentralized and autonomous. Think this is happening in a couple web3 projects, but building aessage framework that could live for 100yrs without updates would be interesting.
https://go.justtact.com/1on1/4vJF3Kw4jKmSfScEv1UryH?from=Kar...
> No results
No bueno.
>iCloud
Choose one
OTH, if you know people using both iOS and Android, then a chat app that can only talk to some of your friends is just not very practical.
I see this single platform thing play out over and over again with regard to communication and I just don't get it.
I know the two ecosystems are very different from a development perspective. Don't shoot the messenger but I think supporting both has kinda become the defacto price for entry nowadays into the *communication* market space. Communicating half way is really no communication at all --- for me anyway.
As one of the makers of Tact, I’ll say that we have mountains of writing on the site on this, which we haven’t really condensed into short bulletproof messaging yet. I’ll say this as a short version:
It’s my opinion or world view that choosing your digital platform these days comes with very long strings attached, privacy and business model being the most relevant ones. I believe in the “Apple way” more than I belive in the “Android way”. (Also add desktop to the mix.)
Tact intends to appeal to the people who share the same world view. I don’t plan to appeal to everyone.
I recognize it’s all just that: an opinion. I don’t claim mine is the only one, or even the right one. I’m not really going to argue or fight about it. I’m glad there’s a lot of choice. I want to provide more choice in the communications space, and provide an option that perhaps some like-minded people have been missing.
Hope you don't mind an observation --- your motivation seems based on ideology as much as if not more so than practicality.
Good luck with the project.
I believe that Apple’s true incentive is to sell their own devices and services to users and businesses, and let developers like Tact participate in the app economy to possibly get a small piece of that.
Google is an ad company. This is why I am as suspicious of Android as many people here are of Apple. What business is Google in, at the end of the day? Who is the product, and who is the customer?
I mentioned desktop because when we operate in the Apple universe, the devices and software all come from the same place, with the same philosophy, for better or worse. When you use e.g a Windows desktop and an Android device, now you suddenly have two separate universes, philosophies and privacy attitudes to figure out. I think Microsoft is doing a great job. They are not in the business of actively abusing you as ad-driven businesses are but their main focus is enterprise and platforms these days because that’s where the money is.