As one of the Tact makers, here’s a bit of backstory. Many years ago, me and a group of friends worked at Skype where we also designed the original Skype chat, among other things. We’ve kept in touch after leaving, and kept trying out different chat tools. Most recently, we used Wire (because some of us also worked there) but more recently Wire also shifted its focus away from consumers and towards business.

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.