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Ask HN: Is anyone solving the problem of having to use many different chat apps?

5 points by atroche ↗ HN
Different parts of my social network are on: SMS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Keybase, Slack, IRC, and Google Hangouts.

It's super inconvenient having all of those installed, running, updating and notifying me on my laptop and phone, leaving aside the fact that I have to remember who uses what, when and how.

Are there any efforts to unify the experience somehow, kind of like how for a while I was able to use Pidgin and Trillian to message across multiple platforms? That was over a decade ago.

Anyone who solved this could easily charge me $100+ a year.

3 comments

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detaro
Some of those won't be easily turned into a product, since various services forbid connecting with third-party software (e.g. WhatsApp or Signal).

That said, Pidgin, BitlBee or other multi-messengers are still around and have interfaces to a surprising number of services, sometimes flying under the radar (e.g. Skype apparently works better than ever, thanks to people adapting the API their webinterface uses). Not all that comfortabe to use from mobile sadly.

So no, to my knowledge nobody is really solving it, but there are bits and pieces that can help.

Overtonwindow
I remember using Pidgin and other products to combine all of the various chat and instant messaging platforms into one, but I recall a significant barrier was API access, and these platforms not wanting that to happen. I would really, really love to integrate Facebook messenger into a single app with my other messaging apps, but I could not see Facebook ever agreeing to this now.
detaro
As far as I know (I don't use it myself), libpurple (which e.g. Pidgin uses) can speak the Facebook Messenger protocol.