Show HN: Couple, a shared diary for you and the one you love

Femi from Hipmob here: security is indeed a concern. There was a recent chain of stories around issues with the authentication of a couple of mobile messenger apps.

We've approached it from a couple of directions: we use TLS everywhere and we don't use any phone-specific identifying information (no IMEIs, phone numbers or anything of that nature). For advanced usage we also allow every single connection to the platform to be authenticated by the host application: if the user authenticates themselves to your servers you can generate a security token that you pass to the app and your app passes to our libraries. This verifies that you authorized the connection. We make that an option the developer can choose to use (or not): let us know if you think of any other scenarios that you think need additional care.

Ayo from Hipmob here. Apps like Pair serve a specific niche in that their private/undistracted, and in addition using an app format as well as data (rather than pure sms) allows you to do more interesting things (Pair for example has shared sketches, video chat and the "thumbkiss"). Our specific goal at Hipmob was to release something lots of developers can play with, that's pretty simple, so they could get comfortable writing chat/messaging apps with our libraries.

Cute, apart from the part where ... sigh. The more software stops being stupid about what gender mixes you should have in relationships, the more it annoys me that nobody ever considers that not everybody is (or wants to be) part of a simple pair bond.

Facebook hasn't figured this one out either; you'll find most poly/etc. people on there either have their status set to "single" or "it's complicated" (there was a fantastically funny day some years ago where all such people I know deleted our relationship statuses simultaneously, causing mass confusion to the people only casually following our existences).

I feel like this isn't really useful feedback on a toy app but ... it would be nice if people wouldn't cast monogamous pairbonding as the only relationship type that "really" exists. I don't feel discriminated against, as such, but I do sometimes feel a little omitted :)

It is explicitly not a party line: conversations are between 2 people (unless it is a group chat, and even then the participants of the group chat are the only ones who see the messages) or between a single person and an operator. We provide a friend list construct that limits who a person can send messages to (so preventing spam) and user-to-user chats are not saved or visible anywhere (live support chats are saved to a per-chat transcript). All data is transmitted over TLS: let me know if there is another privacy angle you think we haven't covered.

Hmm: sounds like you're basically looking for SMS integration? Send me an email (my email is in my profile): we might be able to wrap something around Twilio's interface that could help you. The caveat there is that SMS has explicit per-message costs attached: we'd basically let you put in your Twilio account details but you'd have to pay them yourselves.