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Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

If I understand this, if I use SMS, I can send to everyone. If I use Signal, I can send to Signal users only. But I don't remember who's on Signal, and who's not. So I guess I will stop using Signal.

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If I want to message someone I open the contact and click on one of the messengers that are listed for the phone number. Why would I leave the memorizing to my brain?

Huh. I've never used contacts that way. I suppose it could work but that's a new extra step. My Contacts list is gigantic and full of bullshit I don't care about because it's sync'd from work and flooded with people I don't know. Usually I just find the conversation from the chronological list (which is more of how I remember things). Maybe there's some way to sort contacts by recent use? It just seems like that's leaking metadata to push all of that context into Contacts. Anyway that seems maybe plausible if it can index or springboard to convos in other apps.

Usually I just find the conversation from the chronological list...

Bingo.

Theoretically couldn't an Android app be built using notification access to track notification history and coalate messaging notifications (combining notifications from all/selected/configured) messaging apps? That sort of a "messaging hub" could be even better, frankly.

What'd be even better is if there was a central "messaging" interface where all the various implementations can register as messaging service providers and all your conversations end up in one place.

You'd expect one app to have read access to the notifications of all others?

If I grant it notification access permissions.

My launcher (Niagara) does that already to display notifications in popups connected to app icons.

Notification processing is one of Android's greatest features over iOS.

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