Thanks for the input. I have recently tried migrating away from GoDaddy, but they seem to be holding on tight to my domain! It should be fully functional in the next few days.
True! In the book 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries, he actually had the same idea for a growth strategy for his messaging platform IMVU. It is not a new concept.
The idea is this breaks down the barrier to entry to start incorporating multiple unifications. For example, we start with messaging and next we unify emails. From there we unify live streaming, and then something else. I am not saying these are the things we are going to go on to unify, but that is the concept.
> The app I am developing will combine all forms of communication into one simple application. This will help people digest and send messages / emails from one central location.
This is not a problem the average user is having. Anyone remember the "IM wars"? Most people happily installed all IM programs their friends were on, thus solving the problem. Only a small handful of nerds thought this was intolerable, and installed Adium or Trillian or Miranda or any of the other multi-network instant messengers, and suffered every time an actual network would upgrade or change their protocol.
This time around, people's smartphones are already the unifier. All messaging apps have notifications, so your phone will tell you what everyone is saying across networks, and you just tap to go straight into whatever app the message was in.
Great point. This isn't a problem ever single person is having. Aside from the unified feature, we will have a native messaging feature as well. The long-term goal is to introduce a desktop version and then from there work towards some other initiatives we have.
After unifying messaging, we want to continue to unify other functionalities, to work toward a sort of 'super app'. It starts with messaging and will evolve from there.
In the end, when it is all said and done - we will be very similar to WeChat, but not the same. The rest of the world has needed an app like WeChat, but fits with western culture. I am hesitant to say we aspire to be similar, but in the end it is a similar concept.
How do you plan on keeping up with all the functionality that Instagram, SnapChat, and Facebook Messenger are adding? Will your app have all the photo filters? Video? Video filters? Multi-participant video calls with filters?
What will you do when the underlying networks start to work against you and shut your third-party client out? They don't want you on their network, they don't want people to use your client, they want people on their client, so they get all the metrics and data.
Look, I had a multi-network IM client for a long time, because screen real estate and notification area icon space was limited, and it was nice to have similar-looking dialog boxes for everyone. But those aren't problems on mobile.
I get it, it would be nice to have the app that everyone has installed, but what problem are you solving for average people? Why would they install your thing and not the real thing?
Instagram and Snapchat are out for the first round. The workaround is going to be too great, so those will come in version 2 as we scale our dev efforts. FB Messenger is the one we are going to put our effort into and work around the API. We will have the bare bones to begin, very basic photo and video options. The basic idea for us is to get to a minimal viable product, see if what we are doing makes sense, and then either grow from there or pivot.
There is no doubt at some point we will get a cease and desist, much like Disa did. We are full aware there will be a day when that happens. At that point, we will discontinue their serves and continue using the other ones. The goal for us is to eventually be our own standalone product.
The real problem people are running into is app overload. It isn;t just messaging, but rather apps in general. By unifying messaging first, we can move on to unifying the next thing from there and eventually having one big super app!
Thanks for your questions and feedback, they are honestly super helpful for me to talk through.
> The real problem people are running into is app overload.
Honestly, they don't. In your previous post you went through your scenario of having to check a bunch of apps. You are a developer, not a typical user, so the typical user has way less. Also, all apps have notification icons, so you don't have to open them to figure out if there's anything there, you can take one glance at a screen on your phone, and you know which three had something. Or take a look at the notification area in your phone, which has the same info.
You're building an app for yourself, great! But you have to realize that everyone is not you. :-)
What's funny is, I had this exact conversation with someone today. If nothing else, at least I am developing an app which will be a livesaver for me! :)
I also appreciate you reading the few post I have put out here. I am on a bit of a tear writing lately as part of a new year resolution to write more and improve my writing. I figured I might as well couple it with my little project.
Anyways, I am fully aware this app won't apply to everyone. The way I look at it is not everyone uses so many social networks that they can't handle posting to all of them right? While this might not seem like a huge problem, Hootsuite solved for it and now they are a unicorn.
I get this is a problem me and a few other people have right now, but I believe it is going to get worse. There will be an app after Snapchat, then after that, and the apps will continue to pile up. As for notification, we have some things in the pipeline to improve over messaging experaince as well.
If I backtrack just a bit, I am actually more of a swiss army knife position who works at a startup. Mainly I do customer service and data analysis though.
> This time around, people's smartphones are already the unifier. All messaging apps have notifications, so your phone will tell you what everyone is saying across networks, and you just tap to go straight into whatever app the message was in.
I think you can go even further and say that having different apps for different types of communications is actually a convenience in the context of something like a smartphone. Different apps implicitly cater to a different circle of contacts with distinct levels of privacy, discretion, formality and posterity. If you had to explicitly manage these types of preferences in a single universal app it would be both tedious and error prone. Having separate apps that work is specific ways is just so much simpler to manage, it is convention over configuration.
We are trying to solve for this issue. We have gotten the feedback you stated before and now we are trying to make it so each of integrations can hold on to some unique aspect within our app. We completely understand every native app has a different feel. It is like having conversations a school to a professor (school email) to having a conversation at a bar (Snapchat). We believe we will be able to create certain environments within our app to hold on the environment of native apps.
> We completely understand every native app has a different feel.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think you're missing the point here. Users may like having separate tools to help them differentiate between different communication tasks. I don't think that trying to manage a bunch of messaging apps is a pain point for most/all people.
True, it definitely won't be for all people. I completely get this won't resonate with everyone, but imagine with me for a second. First, we unify messaging and get people interested in that. Then we unify live streams. Then we unify the next thing. At which point we either choose to become something like a super app, or segment it like Zapier.
> Users may like having separate tools to help them differentiate between different communication tasks.
It is because the user ends up having to look at notifications of multiple applications. Those notifications take up space.
Right now they're sorted in a way. For example, the way the lockscreen looks, or the time they've arrived. This doesn't necessarily reflect priority for the user. How to achieve this? I think the correct way is by ML/AI. One way could be looking at which notifications the user tends to open first. Or, for example, look at which correspondence appears to be most used. This could even be combined with other factors such as time of the day, day of the week. E.g. the wife might be less important during 9-5 at a weekday.
Moreover, to reply to your specific point, a user could decide to user Ulum, plus Signal on the side. Or a user could decide decide to run Ulum, MSN Messenger, and ICQ. My point being, an application can abstract some of the protocols but just because it can't do more doesn't mean the user will use that feature. This is entirely up to the user.
Notification priority could be something we do relatively easy. I am not very well versed in the ML/AI space, but with all the resources on the internet, I am sure I could figure it out. That sounds like something that could be a truly unique feature for us, thanks for the input!
Thanks for sharing my other article! I have been on a bit of a writing tear lately. Essentially I am writing to get feedback from people on the product I am developing and to do so, I am writing content. I figured if people read my articles centered around messaging, they would be interested telling me what they would want to see in a messaging app!
Good luck to the author. I used to love in my windows phone 7 back in 2010 when I could combine text, fb messenger, Skype, etc. into one thread. With the people hub you would also see the Facebook and Twitter feed for a particular contact in one place. The support for fb messenger disappeared for some reason, as well as Twitter feed I think, I hope the author takes a look at this as part as a prior art investigation. All friends that used it really liked it. This is one of the big reasons I'm sad windows phone never took off.
Thanks for the feedback! We are early in development, so every little feedback helps us with the direction we take. We will definitely take your feedback into consideration. This messaging hub we are creating should be able to do all of the things you previously loved about your windows phone!
Blackberry hub was great for combining all the messaging systems, easily the best thing that came out of BB10 (and proper app permissions). I would try the android port, but all my family have ios devices and we use mainly use facetime.
BB10 seriously rocks! There are some functionality things I have had people tell me could be improved.
Here is what they said:
Aside from a few janky integrations caused by BB10 emulating Android for done apps, the hub in BB10 was pretty much flawless. BlackBerry are way underrated for the attention they put into UI/UX, especially when it comes to productivity. The same can’t be said for the BlackBerry hub on Android, it’s a long way from the polish of its BB10 counterpart.
My main gripe with the Android version is that for anything other than email, it basically serves as a second notification area; pressing a twitter notification in the hub, for instance, just opens the Twitter app. This is pretty redundant given that Android already has perfectly reasonable notification area. So much so that I’ve removed everything but my email accounts from the BlackBerry hub on Android, and now use it simply as an email client. I will say that it’s by far the best email client I’ve used in Android, and I’ve tried most of them.
For the BlackBerry hub, or UNUM, to truly fulfill its promise, the third party integrations need be to be self-contained (don’t just open another app for me) and feature rich enough to negate the need for me to keep the standard client installed (or at least rich enough for me to turn off notifications on the standard client).
So the real challenge here becomes creating a UI/UX that is consistent across your app but also consistent with the wide variation of UIs/UXs across the third party apps you integrate with.
A little bit of functionality (and a lot of speed) was lost with the move to 8, but then all the unique things about Windows Phone (hubs in particular) were killed around 8.1.
It was really sad, because as a Windows Phone user, I loved finally having a phone on par with Android & iOS with: Cortana, improved browser, action center, Swype, etc. I just hated that they also removed all the things that made it better than Android & iOS.
In the end, I decided I'd be better off just getting an Android, then switched to iOS. I still miss the things my Windows Phone did better (messaging and sync).
First, there was ICQ and AIM. ICQ got bought by AOL, and they added compatibility between each protocol.
Then there is Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) for desktop OSes (Windows/Linux/macOS). Adium is a macOS version of Pidgin, and Bitlbee is an IM to IRC gateway fork of Pidgin. Which means you would be able to access it with your favourite IRC client (possibly with the aid of Tmux/Screen). There were tons and tons of plugins for all these applications available, adding all kind of features, including adding of protocol support. I remember even different versions of protocols being supported. There was even a Skype plugin for Pidgin.
But Skype didn't quite like that plugin. Which brings me to a point: you may end up with fierce opposition from the developers or owners of the official clients, for a myriad of (valid & less valid) reasons. Using Pidgin with ICQ meant less advertisement income for Mirabilis/AOL (the ads were shown when a user would message another, in the message box). Skype/Microsoft doesn't like usage of unofficial clients. Moxie Marlinspike wants people to download the official Signal client from Google Play, and he doesn't want third party clients to use the Signal infrastructure. WhatsApp sued the maker of an unofficial client. Bnetd got taken down [1]. Unofficial KaZaA clients. Really, I'm digressing from IM now. The stories are endless.
Then there is Jabber or XMPP. This had backwards compatibility with previous protocols. Then there were clients which were basically a frontend for those protocols. An outstanding one was Nimbuzz.
What I am saying is that it has been done before. I'm just stating some of the hurdles. If you can license or otherwise come to agreement, avoid those hostile protocols (know before you do a lot of work who/what is a hostile), or just make a plugin implementation and host the 'dark' plugin on Tor or w/e you should be fine.
Great question! This has been something we have really struggled with. We want to be as user-friendly as possible and to so we need to give some things up. We aren't going to store messages, blast ads, or anything intrusive like that. For this reason, we have a few options.
Option number on is we release a free version with limited capabilities and a upgradable version from $.99-$4.99. This isn't the desirable route because the more users we have on our network, the better it will work. We want to encourage anyone and everyone to join.
Option number 2 (the route we will take) will mainly consist of monetizing businesses who want to use the platform. Much like Snapchat, this will consist of sponsored content, geo options, and other business-centric features. This option will require us to scale quickly, but I am pretty sure it is the route we are going to take.
For the first few months we are going to bootstrap it and focus on user experience and not focus on monetizing users at all. As we scale and grow our user base we can start focusing on things like that.
For anyone not interested in reading the whole article, essentially I am building an app which will combine all forms of communication into one simple application. This will help people digest and send messages / emails from one central location.
I am currently in the early stages of development for my unified messaging platform, which I have named UNUM messenger.
I plan to launch UNUM messenger in March of 2017 as a Beta. If you would like to be notified when UNUM messenger launches, you can sign up here - http://www.unummessenger.com
More than anything, I am looking for feedback on what people would want to see on an app like this. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.
I apologize, I don't intend for this to sound as rude as its going to or if I'm just out of the loop but...
I don't know who you are or why I should care what you are developing? People have known that messaging has been fucked for a very long time, and many people have tried to make a one size fits all solution for messaging.
What makes you different?
In a related tangent, Messaging is really fucked. Email is thrashed. To the point that it requires consistent effort and continuous maintenance for it to be useful at all.
I love the idea of a unified service. But I don't know why facebook or skype or slack would ever give up a customer to your interface?
I am open to any and all feedback, so I am not offended at all friend!
To be honest, I am not necessarily asking for you to care about what I am doing. What I am looking for is constructive feedback, which you provided me in your comment, so thank you!
What makes us different is we are not only going to unify, but also provide native messaging through our app. For this reason, we will introduce features that set us apart solely for being a native messaging app.
I agree email is basically useless at this point. Later down the road, we do have plans to have our app help in the overthrowing of email and eventually replacing it with messaging. You can read more about that here if you would like - https://artplusmarketing.com/can-messaging-replace-email-a83...
Some apps we definitely won't be able to integrate with. We will need to start lean and work from there meaning only having a handful of integrations to begin. From there we will be able to get a bigger dev team and work around API limitations.
I really apprecaite you responding and all of your feedback!
What's really bizarre to me is how some people use a whole bunch of messaging apps. My girlfriend uses iMessage to text me, Facebook messanger to text several friends, WhatsApp for one of her girlfriends. Why not standardize? Alas I am not everyone and I need to remember that.
Haha I wish it were that simple. I alone use over 10 messaging apps. They all serve a different purpose. For example I use WhatsApp to talk to my wife and friends. I use Slack to communicate with my team. I use Intercom to chat live with customers. I use email to correspond with vendors. Not to mention all of the messages I check across social media every day. If nothing else, this app will be a lifesaver for me! :)
Great point, I am not sure we can get to the point where we can encompass ever single scenario, but maybe. Group chats are something I have had a problem thinking through. At the moment, it is the number one thing on my list to find a solution for!
The thing is that I know fOr a fact that in this particular group of people everyone has free SMS and/or iMessage. Moreover, they all know rah others' real names and phone numbers. Some talk on the phone, yet use Facebook for messages. These are not people who care about federation. It's just some kind of bizarre force of habit.
These are also all the people who have at least a thousand unread emails in their inboxes. I know one person who has roughly 60k unread emails dating back to 1997 when she created her AOL account. She is not a Luddite and very good at using other types of tech but somehow never mastered email.
Haha that is hilarious, but honestly - I have around 3k unread emails too (I keep it up to date now, but these accumulated years ago!)
There is no doubt, people are going to struggle heavily to catch on to messaging. People seem to just now be getting social media (which is why it is dying) and now they have to adjst to messaging.
The social landscape has changed since the early days of messaging. Everybody chats using their real names in an age where saying the wrong thing could mean you lose your job (or worse). People compartmentalize more. Close friends gets one set of thoughts, parents get another set of thoughts, work colleagues get a third. It's easier to compartmentalize with completely separate apps. None of the messaging apps I've ever used (not even tweetdeck) makes managing multiple identities easy. And then there are the network effects of completely disparate social groups...
Wow great insights. I agree I have never used a unification app that executed, but that is exactly what we are aiming for. Job because it has never been done does not mean it can't be. By doing things like talking to people on here, it is my goal to be nothing like anything any of the other apps tried to do.
I agree with what you said about Tweetdeck, but what we are trying to do is more of a Tweetdeck / Hootsuite hybrid.
What I want more than anything is a popular open protocol. I want to be able to choose between 10 different messaging apps on each of the platforms that I use and they all speak the same protocol.
I wouldn't call XMPP "unpopular". But my real point ran a little deeper. That's the world we've consistently moved away from - interoperability seems to be treated as a bug, not a feature.
> (And no, this hasn't happened yet with XMPP. XMPP has, for a variety of reasons completely failed. We need to let it die and start from scratch with something actually designed with mobile devices in mind)
My take is that if we look at a longer view, right now messaging apps are fighting for marketshare by competing on features. This is a really useful fight to have - what do people want in messaging apps? GIF keyboards? Stickers? E2E encryption? Photo filters? Video messages?
A high churn rate is bad for federation - federation requires a spec, and specs are like unit tests. You don't want to write them in the experimentation phase before you know what you're building.
Over time the churn will slow down (this is happening already) and we'll probably see a standardish set of decent messaging features that everyone wants. (Good notifications, emoji, photos, low battery consumption, e2e encryption and obviously a gif keyboard.)
When we know what we want it shouldn't be too hard to write a spec and start drumming up interest in some decent opensource federated servers and clients. Signal might be a great place to start - but I think we should wait another year or two. Even signal isn't stable enough yet.
(And no, this hasn't happened yet with XMPP. XMPP has, for a variety of reasons completely failed. We need to let it die and start from scratch with something actually designed with mobile devices in mind)
This has all kind of happened before with MSN, Yahoo, AOl, etc and the corporations have closed it all off again[0].
I'm not holding out hope for the future. I believe it will be all closed protocols and tightly tied to whatever platform owns the protocol.
[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.
In the book, 'The Lean Startup' author Eric Ries actually used this strategy for his messaging company IMVU. Essentially he wanted to do the same thing I am doing, but for MSN, Yahoo, Aim, etc. It ended up being a catastrophic fail in one of the most read books in the startup world. Can you blame anyone for not trying it?!
Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.
I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)
The features you mention all should stand the tale of time in the messaging world and I safe it's safe to assume we will incorporate all of them eventually.
Incredible insights on companies fighting for market share. This is leading to all of the innovation now, and soon the dust will settle. At which point, we can sweep in and offer something unique to the common user!
If you feel (as I do) that they haven't sufficiently adapted to the current era, why do you think any other open protocol would be able to change more easily?
>>There has always been a fear of face-to-face communication with people outside of your ‘inner circle’. Messaging apps have removed the face-to-face fear people have...
That is simply not true. Messaging apps allow people to hide behind screens, to avoid facing their fears and are killing real communication.
Very true, when you are sending someone a message you are hiding behind a screen. Instead of an instant, 'the first thing that comes to your head' kind of response, it is edited and refined. It certinly is not the same as face-to-face communication.
While this is true, I feel it is also true that people are scared of face-to-face communication. Hell I couldn't take to a girl face to face until high school and even then I struggled, but truth be told - I could text like a boss.
Whether it hurt real communication or not is a debate, but either way messaging is going to happen.
Very true! When you think about how email is dying and everyone is messaging, there is a lot of opportunity. For example the conversation I am having here on HN are way more valuable than if all of us were in a room talking. It may be more fun, but we wouldn't be having these types of conversations.
I am just a person who loves to communicate. If I write something I acknoledge someone is taking the time to read what I worked on. Not only are they reading it, but they are thinking about it, expressing their opinion, and giving their feedback.
It would be nothing short of a sin to not show my gratitude to everyone who shares their valuable time with me.
I respect your opinion and you have every write to feel the way you do. With that being said, responding is something I want to do.
The only thing that matters to me is total and absolute privacy, I should be able to chat with people I care about and not have any third-party involved. No advertising companies, no anonymous collection, no state surveillance, nothing. I don't want anyone scraping my business for any purpose. I'll pay to have it that way if I must (thought I don't see why I should have too).
I don't care about stickers, emoticons, videos or anything else.
I know apps exist that do this now, but this needs to be the default behavior and there should be an open standard for achieving this. It's 2017, we should've had this in 1998.
If I can't have something like this soon, then I'll make it myself.
I couldn't agree more. Honestly we are so early in development, we don't know what we are going to do for data collection, but there are a few things we are certain of.
- Your messages will be encrypted (end-to-end.)
- We will never spy on or store any of your conversations or media.
- No state survailence.
As for ads, we aren't entirely sure. We could make the app 99 cents and have no ads, or we could have a few ads or maybe both. I am not sure yet.
Either way, I really appreciate the feedback and would love to hear if you had any more suggestions!
81 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadTaking about messaging on phones without even mentioning SMS, seems uninformed to me.
The idea is this breaks down the barrier to entry to start incorporating multiple unifications. For example, we start with messaging and next we unify emails. From there we unify live streaming, and then something else. I am not saying these are the things we are going to go on to unify, but that is the concept.
This is not a problem the average user is having. Anyone remember the "IM wars"? Most people happily installed all IM programs their friends were on, thus solving the problem. Only a small handful of nerds thought this was intolerable, and installed Adium or Trillian or Miranda or any of the other multi-network instant messengers, and suffered every time an actual network would upgrade or change their protocol.
This time around, people's smartphones are already the unifier. All messaging apps have notifications, so your phone will tell you what everyone is saying across networks, and you just tap to go straight into whatever app the message was in.
After unifying messaging, we want to continue to unify other functionalities, to work toward a sort of 'super app'. It starts with messaging and will evolve from there.
What will you do when the underlying networks start to work against you and shut your third-party client out? They don't want you on their network, they don't want people to use your client, they want people on their client, so they get all the metrics and data.
Look, I had a multi-network IM client for a long time, because screen real estate and notification area icon space was limited, and it was nice to have similar-looking dialog boxes for everyone. But those aren't problems on mobile.
I get it, it would be nice to have the app that everyone has installed, but what problem are you solving for average people? Why would they install your thing and not the real thing?
Instagram and Snapchat are out for the first round. The workaround is going to be too great, so those will come in version 2 as we scale our dev efforts. FB Messenger is the one we are going to put our effort into and work around the API. We will have the bare bones to begin, very basic photo and video options. The basic idea for us is to get to a minimal viable product, see if what we are doing makes sense, and then either grow from there or pivot.
There is no doubt at some point we will get a cease and desist, much like Disa did. We are full aware there will be a day when that happens. At that point, we will discontinue their serves and continue using the other ones. The goal for us is to eventually be our own standalone product.
The real problem people are running into is app overload. It isn;t just messaging, but rather apps in general. By unifying messaging first, we can move on to unifying the next thing from there and eventually having one big super app!
Thanks for your questions and feedback, they are honestly super helpful for me to talk through.
Honestly, they don't. In your previous post you went through your scenario of having to check a bunch of apps. You are a developer, not a typical user, so the typical user has way less. Also, all apps have notification icons, so you don't have to open them to figure out if there's anything there, you can take one glance at a screen on your phone, and you know which three had something. Or take a look at the notification area in your phone, which has the same info.
You're building an app for yourself, great! But you have to realize that everyone is not you. :-)
I also appreciate you reading the few post I have put out here. I am on a bit of a tear writing lately as part of a new year resolution to write more and improve my writing. I figured I might as well couple it with my little project.
Anyways, I am fully aware this app won't apply to everyone. The way I look at it is not everyone uses so many social networks that they can't handle posting to all of them right? While this might not seem like a huge problem, Hootsuite solved for it and now they are a unicorn.
I get this is a problem me and a few other people have right now, but I believe it is going to get worse. There will be an app after Snapchat, then after that, and the apps will continue to pile up. As for notification, we have some things in the pipeline to improve over messaging experaince as well.
If I backtrack just a bit, I am actually more of a swiss army knife position who works at a startup. Mainly I do customer service and data analysis though.
Thanks for your input!
I think you can go even further and say that having different apps for different types of communications is actually a convenience in the context of something like a smartphone. Different apps implicitly cater to a different circle of contacts with distinct levels of privacy, discretion, formality and posterity. If you had to explicitly manage these types of preferences in a single universal app it would be both tedious and error prone. Having separate apps that work is specific ways is just so much simpler to manage, it is convention over configuration.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think you're missing the point here. Users may like having separate tools to help them differentiate between different communication tasks. I don't think that trying to manage a bunch of messaging apps is a pain point for most/all people.
If it isn't a pain point already, then by definition you're solving a problem that isn't there.
It is because the user ends up having to look at notifications of multiple applications. Those notifications take up space.
Right now they're sorted in a way. For example, the way the lockscreen looks, or the time they've arrived. This doesn't necessarily reflect priority for the user. How to achieve this? I think the correct way is by ML/AI. One way could be looking at which notifications the user tends to open first. Or, for example, look at which correspondence appears to be most used. This could even be combined with other factors such as time of the day, day of the week. E.g. the wife might be less important during 9-5 at a weekday.
Moreover, to reply to your specific point, a user could decide to user Ulum, plus Signal on the side. Or a user could decide decide to run Ulum, MSN Messenger, and ICQ. My point being, an application can abstract some of the protocols but just because it can't do more doesn't mean the user will use that feature. This is entirely up to the user.
Right, everything is entirely up to the user.
Here is what they said:
Aside from a few janky integrations caused by BB10 emulating Android for done apps, the hub in BB10 was pretty much flawless. BlackBerry are way underrated for the attention they put into UI/UX, especially when it comes to productivity. The same can’t be said for the BlackBerry hub on Android, it’s a long way from the polish of its BB10 counterpart.
My main gripe with the Android version is that for anything other than email, it basically serves as a second notification area; pressing a twitter notification in the hub, for instance, just opens the Twitter app. This is pretty redundant given that Android already has perfectly reasonable notification area. So much so that I’ve removed everything but my email accounts from the BlackBerry hub on Android, and now use it simply as an email client. I will say that it’s by far the best email client I’ve used in Android, and I’ve tried most of them.
For the BlackBerry hub, or UNUM, to truly fulfill its promise, the third party integrations need be to be self-contained (don’t just open another app for me) and feature rich enough to negate the need for me to keep the standard client installed (or at least rich enough for me to turn off notifications on the standard client).
So the real challenge here becomes creating a UI/UX that is consistent across your app but also consistent with the wide variation of UIs/UXs across the third party apps you integrate with.
It was really sad, because as a Windows Phone user, I loved finally having a phone on par with Android & iOS with: Cortana, improved browser, action center, Swype, etc. I just hated that they also removed all the things that made it better than Android & iOS.
In the end, I decided I'd be better off just getting an Android, then switched to iOS. I still miss the things my Windows Phone did better (messaging and sync).
First, there was ICQ and AIM. ICQ got bought by AOL, and they added compatibility between each protocol.
Then there is Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) for desktop OSes (Windows/Linux/macOS). Adium is a macOS version of Pidgin, and Bitlbee is an IM to IRC gateway fork of Pidgin. Which means you would be able to access it with your favourite IRC client (possibly with the aid of Tmux/Screen). There were tons and tons of plugins for all these applications available, adding all kind of features, including adding of protocol support. I remember even different versions of protocols being supported. There was even a Skype plugin for Pidgin.
But Skype didn't quite like that plugin. Which brings me to a point: you may end up with fierce opposition from the developers or owners of the official clients, for a myriad of (valid & less valid) reasons. Using Pidgin with ICQ meant less advertisement income for Mirabilis/AOL (the ads were shown when a user would message another, in the message box). Skype/Microsoft doesn't like usage of unofficial clients. Moxie Marlinspike wants people to download the official Signal client from Google Play, and he doesn't want third party clients to use the Signal infrastructure. WhatsApp sued the maker of an unofficial client. Bnetd got taken down [1]. Unofficial KaZaA clients. Really, I'm digressing from IM now. The stories are endless.
Then there is Jabber or XMPP. This had backwards compatibility with previous protocols. Then there were clients which were basically a frontend for those protocols. An outstanding one was Nimbuzz.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
I completely and undoubtedly agree with everything you are saying, but just because it hasn't been done before doesn't mean it can't.
We are fully aware there will be a day where we have to stand on our own tow feet, and we will be ready when that day comes.
Option number on is we release a free version with limited capabilities and a upgradable version from $.99-$4.99. This isn't the desirable route because the more users we have on our network, the better it will work. We want to encourage anyone and everyone to join.
Option number 2 (the route we will take) will mainly consist of monetizing businesses who want to use the platform. Much like Snapchat, this will consist of sponsored content, geo options, and other business-centric features. This option will require us to scale quickly, but I am pretty sure it is the route we are going to take.
For the first few months we are going to bootstrap it and focus on user experience and not focus on monetizing users at all. As we scale and grow our user base we can start focusing on things like that.
I am currently in the early stages of development for my unified messaging platform, which I have named UNUM messenger. I plan to launch UNUM messenger in March of 2017 as a Beta. If you would like to be notified when UNUM messenger launches, you can sign up here - http://www.unummessenger.com
More than anything, I am looking for feedback on what people would want to see on an app like this. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Thanks! Peter
I don't know who you are or why I should care what you are developing? People have known that messaging has been fucked for a very long time, and many people have tried to make a one size fits all solution for messaging.
What makes you different?
In a related tangent, Messaging is really fucked. Email is thrashed. To the point that it requires consistent effort and continuous maintenance for it to be useful at all.
I love the idea of a unified service. But I don't know why facebook or skype or slack would ever give up a customer to your interface?
To be honest, I am not necessarily asking for you to care about what I am doing. What I am looking for is constructive feedback, which you provided me in your comment, so thank you!
What makes us different is we are not only going to unify, but also provide native messaging through our app. For this reason, we will introduce features that set us apart solely for being a native messaging app.
I agree email is basically useless at this point. Later down the road, we do have plans to have our app help in the overthrowing of email and eventually replacing it with messaging. You can read more about that here if you would like - https://artplusmarketing.com/can-messaging-replace-email-a83...
Some apps we definitely won't be able to integrate with. We will need to start lean and work from there meaning only having a handful of integrations to begin. From there we will be able to get a bigger dev team and work around API limitations.
I really apprecaite you responding and all of your feedback!
You can't. These apps don't federate, and not everyone uses all of them.
As I wrote this comment, I realized I use more apps than I thought.
I use SMS for some folks, Messenger for others, and Slack, Hangouts, and GroupMe for specific groups.
If I'm in a 5+ person group chat, I can't really ask everyone to move to something else. And I want to hear what's going on, so I keep the app around.
These are also all the people who have at least a thousand unread emails in their inboxes. I know one person who has roughly 60k unread emails dating back to 1997 when she created her AOL account. She is not a Luddite and very good at using other types of tech but somehow never mastered email.
There is no doubt, people are going to struggle heavily to catch on to messaging. People seem to just now be getting social media (which is why it is dying) and now they have to adjst to messaging.
I agree with what you said about Tweetdeck, but what we are trying to do is more of a Tweetdeck / Hootsuite hybrid.
Feedback is really important to me. I truly enjoy communicating with people. I gain something from every single conversation I have.
Hmmm... needs editing.
[0]http://www.unummessenger.com/
Thanks for the feedback, I just updated it now! :)
I think we all agree with that.
A high churn rate is bad for federation - federation requires a spec, and specs are like unit tests. You don't want to write them in the experimentation phase before you know what you're building.
Over time the churn will slow down (this is happening already) and we'll probably see a standardish set of decent messaging features that everyone wants. (Good notifications, emoji, photos, low battery consumption, e2e encryption and obviously a gif keyboard.)
When we know what we want it shouldn't be too hard to write a spec and start drumming up interest in some decent opensource federated servers and clients. Signal might be a great place to start - but I think we should wait another year or two. Even signal isn't stable enough yet.
(And no, this hasn't happened yet with XMPP. XMPP has, for a variety of reasons completely failed. We need to let it die and start from scratch with something actually designed with mobile devices in mind)
[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.
Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.
I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)
Incredible insights on companies fighting for market share. This is leading to all of the innovation now, and soon the dust will settle. At which point, we can sweep in and offer something unique to the common user!
If you feel (as I do) that they haven't sufficiently adapted to the current era, why do you think any other open protocol would be able to change more easily?
That is simply not true. Messaging apps allow people to hide behind screens, to avoid facing their fears and are killing real communication.
While this is true, I feel it is also true that people are scared of face-to-face communication. Hell I couldn't take to a girl face to face until high school and even then I struggled, but truth be told - I could text like a boss.
Whether it hurt real communication or not is a debate, but either way messaging is going to happen.
You are totally right, messaging is going to happen. It is even better for me.
And I have a lot of f2f discussions about this, even if I know that most people feel being offended by my opinion.
It would be nothing short of a sin to not show my gratitude to everyone who shares their valuable time with me.
I respect your opinion and you have every write to feel the way you do. With that being said, responding is something I want to do.
A face-to-face conversation would be entirly different, but that's the beauty of the internet right?!
I don't care about stickers, emoticons, videos or anything else.
I know apps exist that do this now, but this needs to be the default behavior and there should be an open standard for achieving this. It's 2017, we should've had this in 1998.
If I can't have something like this soon, then I'll make it myself.
As for ads, we aren't entirely sure. We could make the app 99 cents and have no ads, or we could have a few ads or maybe both. I am not sure yet.
Either way, I really appreciate the feedback and would love to hear if you had any more suggestions!