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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that so many people want to unify all their messages. For me, I like having different apps that I can check with different frequency. I am glad that I can get my iMessages immediately but that LinkedIn messages don't get delivered to me until I open the app/website. I have literally never had an issue where I didn't get a message in time because it was sent via the wrong platform. People who need to reach me urgently know how to do so.

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The problem arise when your friends can text you on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, Bsky, Mastodon, Skype, Slack, Email.

It's not that you don't receive messages but that you need to keep installed 14 different applications on your phone or get used to 14 different UIs to do the same thing.

The major problem is the WhatsApp vs Telegram split for me, if all my friends were on Telegram I wouldn't really need it.

Self hosted Matrix sounds like a good solution and I'm happy with managing my own server - but the UI quality (Elements) is just not on par with Telegram, so I'm still there.

I agree with you, it's nice to relegate spam to Linkedin / Email, but that can be achieved with marking contacts as friends vs random people and having a unified messaging platform.

Yes, this is exactly it. And in an age where people are terminally on their phones, having 14 different apps that can all launch notifications from the background as long as they are installed and you are logged in is perhaps fine. On a Mac or PC in particular it would be nice to have other options around aggregating these messages in a single interface as we used to be able to do 20 years ago.

Yeah, I can understand the appeal a bit more on a computer. On my phone, it's a problem that's already been solved at the OS level.

That's a perfectly valid workflow, but it would certainly be nice for people who do want a unified workflow to be able to have that option.

For sure. I just wonder who these people are and how large the market is, since none of my friends/family are in it. It's possible this is much more popular on Android, or outside the US (perhaps because they use WhatsApp more than iPhone-using Americans). But if this is the case, I wonder how much they will be able to charge, since Android users are less monetizable than iPhone users, and the US has a good chunk of the highly-monetizable mobile audience.

For me, my unified workflow is my phone, which I have tuned to receive notifications from various platforms in various different ways (push, pull, manual). Even if I could tune Beeper to do the same, I would prefer not to have to duplicate my effort in setting preferences, which I've already set at the OS level.

Such an app/service would not work towards the interests of message recipients - but the message senders. Those interests are not aligned.

Why are they not aligned?

If I send someone a text and they receive it in their email inbox because that's their preference, what difference does it make to me as the sender?

When you send an SMS text message, there's a understanding (and therefore, an expectation) that it goes directly to the recipient's phone/smartwatch and that they can reply immediately; i.e.: it's a system for high-priority (and therefore highly-intrusive) communications - this is why people generally don't give-out their mobile-phone number to strangers.

Unless you go to the effort to tell people that you route your SMS messages to e-mail and therefore reply in-your-own-time (hours/days/weeks delay), the people trying to contact you aren't going to expect that: they're going to expect you to reply much sooner. I'd be out of a job if my boss' panicked SMS messages about how our prod website is down went to email instead of my phone.

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Any kind of "universal" messaging platform that anyone can use to send anyone a message needs to allow recipients to set how maximially intrusive those messages are - but senders might also want a way to set how minimally intrusive those messages are. Those requirements cannot be easily reconciled in a way that protects privacy and prevents abuse while also allowing anonymous and unsolicited messages or senders. So far the "best" way to do that today is by segregating senders (not recipients) by system (e.g. private SMS for high-intrusive; less-private-but-guarded e-mail for low-intrusive; public social-media, etc).

Consider services that tried to work-around that, such as LinkedIn's paid messaging feature - which didn't exactly go very well.

I like having apps I can check with different frequencies. What I don't like is when I have two apps that I have to check regularly. Thankfully, almost everyone I talk to regularly uses Signal, but there's those few stragglers who stubbornly cling to SMS.

I agree. I even like to silence notifications on different messaging apps depending on my focus mode on iOS/macOS.

iOS/Messages is almost here. You can mute certain conversations, and set certain contacts as MVPs. But it has a few gaps w.r.t. focus modes.

You can't receive messages via iMessage without disclosing your phone-number or Apple ID e-mail address to the sender. Furthermore, doing anything that changes your phone-number (e.g. using a local SIM abroad instead of roaming) invalidates your phone-number with iMessage, but because most people use iMessage via phone-numbers it means you're forced to use roaming ($$$) when travelling, and so on and so on.

So long as iMessage is sold as "better SMS" then that's fine, as it inherits SMS's limitations (above) - but it isn't a portable, platform-agnostic, geography-neutral, messaging platform, and I'd rather people didn't try to use it as such.

And what prevents these aggregator apps from having different settings for each network?

I imagine this is possible, but as someone who has tuned these settings in the OS-level notification preferences, why would I want to do it all over again within an aggregator app?

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