Few of my friends have been building Tact for a while now and it's an honest first push into the space with a native apps leveraging iCloud for most of behind the scenes tech.
If all the people you know only use iOS --- you probably don't know very many people.
OTH, if you know people using both iOS and Android, then a chat app that can only talk to some of your friends is just not very practical.
I see this single platform thing play out over and over again with regard to communication and I just don't get it.
I know the two ecosystems are very different from a development perspective. Don't shoot the messenger but I think supporting both has kinda become the defacto price for entry nowadays into the *communication* market space. Communicating half way is really no communication at all --- for me anyway.
Thank you for these comments. Won’t shoot the messenger, that is a valid viewpoint.
As one of the makers of Tact, I’ll say that we have mountains of writing on the site on this, which we haven’t really condensed into short bulletproof messaging yet. I’ll say this as a short version:
It’s my opinion or world view that choosing your digital platform these days comes with very long strings attached, privacy and business model being the most relevant ones. I believe in the “Apple way” more than I belive in the “Android way”. (Also add desktop to the mix.)
Tact intends to appeal to the people who share the same world view. I don’t plan to appeal to everyone.
I recognize it’s all just that: an opinion. I don’t claim mine is the only one, or even the right one. I’m not really going to argue or fight about it. I’m glad there’s a lot of choice. I want to provide more choice in the communications space, and provide an option that perhaps some like-minded people have been missing.
I am curious, Apple's way as in Apple's ideology vs Google's ideology? Is that in terms of privacy or the company as a whole? And if you dont mind sharing what are those ideals on Apple, Google and Desktop, I am assuming that means Microsoft?
At the end of the day, it goes back to a very simple question - what is the basic business model, and how does money move? Who is paying for what, and what are the true incentives?
I believe that Apple’s true incentive is to sell their own devices and services to users and businesses, and let developers like Tact participate in the app economy to possibly get a small piece of that.
Google is an ad company. This is why I am as suspicious of Android as many people here are of Apple. What business is Google in, at the end of the day? Who is the product, and who is the customer?
I mentioned desktop because when we operate in the Apple universe, the devices and software all come from the same place, with the same philosophy, for better or worse. When you use e.g a Windows desktop and an Android device, now you suddenly have two separate universes, philosophies and privacy attitudes to figure out. I think Microsoft is doing a great job. They are not in the business of actively abusing you as ad-driven businesses are but their main focus is enterprise and platforms these days because that’s where the money is.
As one of the Tact makers, here’s a bit of backstory. Many years ago, me and a group of friends worked at Skype where we also designed the original Skype chat, among other things. We’ve kept in touch after leaving, and kept trying out different chat tools. Most recently, we used Wire (because some of us also worked there) but more recently Wire also shifted its focus away from consumers and towards business.
So for quite a while, we had this joke, “we should make our own chat app”. Of course. That’s all it was, just a joke. But the thought kept nagging me until I did a thought experiment. “What if… it was not a joke?” What would it take? Knowing that I had no time and no money to put into it, what kind of chat app would and could I make? The thought experiment very quickly led me to iCloud that provides two vital services–users and backend.
So for past many months, we had a functional technical experiment of Tact trying to answer the question, is it possible to build Tact on iCloud like this? To date, I haven’t seen any evidence that it wouldn’t be possible.
That’s where Tact comes from. We realize there are many chat apps already out there. We aim to provide some extra choice and an option that we think should exist, but hasn’t. Here’s my subjective list of why I think Tact is different.
- Apple only.
- Straight from your device to iCloud. We never see your data.
- No ads. No data harvesting. No other weird shady things. Everything clean and honest, just as you see on our site.
- No new user account. You just use your iCloud account.
- No discovery. No one will bother you with unwanted “connection requests”.
- No private data access. We don’t ask for any data access on your device, or phone number, or anything.
- Great media experience. Share any media or files, even large. Neat web previews.
- Great desktop app.
- No funding. Completely bootstrapped indie for now. We only answer to our own conscience and personal savings. No pressure for quick growth.
I do not use iMessage. I mean I tried it and still do use it maybe couple of times a year. It didn’t fly with any of my contacts around here. Much worse results than my Signal and Matrix evangelism attempts.
It’s just that I’m in a geographical area where blue tick - green tick didn’t become a thing and people use other messaging apps which are better than iMessage by light years; and that’s good.
Anyway, is it possible that OP was pointing to iMessage simply being inferior? And it is inferior, just like pretty much any online service from Apple. And Apple’s recent convoluted u-turn on privacy.
But still, yeah, “dignity” is too strong a term to be used in this context maybe.
The “dignity” part applies less to Apple’s Messages, and more to using ad-funded software where you are the product being “monetized” and manipulated. I find that repulsive and degrading.
Messages and Tact come from the same place in that both aim to just enable people to communicate, without any further sinister or degrading motive.
No doubt it seems bizarre if you expect it to be consistent, but it's far from consistent—for the simple reason that we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Congratulations on launching because that's no easy feat. However, I'm not sure what an Apple only chat application adds to the world. What does this do that iMessage doesn't?
I’m sure this is going to sound too negative but I just can’t see how a paid chat app that only works on Apple devices is going to work out. Those two things alone are showstoppers for most of the people. And as others have said, iMessages already exists and offers the same and IMHO does it well (and free).
Agreed, it looks like a really nice product and I wish people would pay for quality software like this, but the market is super saturated, and even free, cross-platform chat platforms struggle to gain users since they require their friends to use it too.
Agreed. I choose not to use Apple products for my own reasons, and it's frustrating that Apple refuses to let people into their iMessage garden while also refusing to implement open chat standards. RCS is far from perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than SMS, and even can support end-to-end encryption now.
Speaking of iMessage... that's already a thing, and it's already an Apple-only chat platform. Not sure what Tact brings to the world if it's also Apple-only. Based on OP's description (looks like it's pinned as the first comment and can't be replied to), Tact seems like "iMessage, but not as good".
Disagree. Pixelmator is awesome, huge cottage industry of niche MacOS app and marketshare of Windows+Linux much bigger for the “less fortunate” to choose from.
A lot in here to love. Non-perishable software that just works and people are happy to pay as a result.
However, you maybe missed the message wars I, II, and III starting back in ~1997.
As an Android user and software dev, realize the biggest motivation would be to reduce friction across "borders".
The 2nd bone of contentiin is having 8 excited to pay and 2 whom do not. This goes back to the common denominator.
You must eliminate friction and while noble ideals, Telegram, Signal and others have a heck of a headstart even outside of iMessage.
As an idea...make it decentralized and autonomous. Think this is happening in a couple web3 projects, but building aessage framework that could live for 100yrs without updates would be interesting.
I don't see much point in a chat app that works only on Apple. That means I could only talk to Apple users, which are about 20-30% here in Europe (by the way Apple's lower marketshare here compared to the US is also why iMessage is not very popular and Whatsapp is instead).
There's so many of them already, I have heavy app fatigue :) I would really want something that reduces the number of chat apps, not adds one. (Like Beeper and Element One are doing based on Matrix).
(3) Hitching your boat to Apple locks out the vast majority of potential users.
(4) The landscape of chat apps in 2021 is way different than when Skype came about... Discord is a beast that was built on just MariaDB after a few months of development time and scaled to 100 million users, using only a few terrabytes of data before doing a major re-write of the code switching to Cassandra NoSQL. Your users value privacy? Give them a private cloud and allow them the option of getting away from a provider that compromises their endpoints...
Ideas:
(1) Dark mode. Look at Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost.
(2) Support for opensource, self-hosted clouds would give this app a reason to exist. Example -- Nextcloud integration or something as an alternative to iCloud...
(3) Maybe even sell the software as a completely self hosted, E2E thing using something akin to the OMEMO methods.
(4) Design / Designers could help with branding the product more.
If their goal is independent governance and not needing outside funding, tying themselves to Apple makes plenty of sense.
Android users don't pay money.
That's a slight overgeneralization of course, but when you look at stats showing Android having a massively larger share of users than iOS, you need to realize the vast majority of the user base will not spend money on a service like this or any others for that matter.
If you narrow it down to people who regularly spend money on apps, iOS is clearly the platform to go with.
And using iCloud means one of the biggest dangers to their financial independence is gone: Having to pay for exponentially more storage to go with exponential growth.
I think the greatest potential of this app thus far is that your development and especially overhead costs have been very low. You may be able to add some functionality that does differentiate it from iMessage and attract a user base.
I like the interface, especially the desktop one. It looks less like a messaging app and more like a note-taking or collaborative app, not sure if that indicates the direction you want to go.
Thank you, good observations. Yes, we have designed and built the system in a way that can be sustainable with a reasonably small investment or number of paying users. It’s very intentional to not have pressure for quick growth and “monetizing”, and we can take a bit of time to figure it out.
I agree with your “note-taking or collaborative” sentiment. We aim to provide a different experience from many other chat apps. More… calm? Professional? Boring? Serious? Respectful? We haven’t quite figured out the adjectives, but yes, it is intentional.
The other idea that comes to mind is something in between push messaging and email. Something more designed for thoughtful discussions than quick SMS ‘on the way!’ type bits.
Email can obviously cover that but is very multi-purpose and not necessarily ideal either.
Then there are apps like Slack or Discord, but those aren’t exactly the same either (and are server-based.)
Hmmm, is this using the Private iCloud Database/Container feature by any chance?
If so, I wonder if you'd get a warmer reception if you explained this. It's an interesting feature of iCloud that really isn't replicated anywhere else and is actually very cool.
I considered building an application like this awhile back when I realized how you could make the invitation links cleaner than the default ways iCloud handles it, but the landscape felt too crowded for one person. I like the design and approach though - good luck!
Yes. We fully embrace the iCloud/CloudKit security model. All chats live in the private database of the owner, and are shared with others through the iCloud sharing facilities and the shared database. And yes, while it all goes back to iCloud share links in the end, we built our own layer of invitation links and connection requests on top of that, which provides you more support and context, until you finally have to accept the iCloud share link.
I agree it is an interesting feature, works well, and I wonder why aren’t more apps built with that. Perhaps one reason is that the developer experience is somewhat esoteric. It took me quite a while to figure out how it all works and how to put all the pieces together.
Yeah... it's a very undocumented area of work, heh. There are a few other apps who've tried this, but the part they seemed to struggle with was gaining traction being iOS only. Hope your experience differs!
I had a few members of the iCloud team reach out after that to see if I wanted to interview with them. Without saying too much, I think they definitely are aware it could be used more widely... such a shame, it's a very well designed system yet gets the blanket "it's custom Apple built so thus it's odd junk" label.
The Principles page has a section under “Technology” titled “We reluctantly operate some infrastructure” where it describes your own notification system (instead of CloudKit).
But later on in the same page, the following promise is made under the “Harm Reduction” section:
> Straight to Apple servers. Tact does not store your messages, files, photos, or any other data. They are stored only on Apple servers, and we as the makers of Tact have no access to them. We cannot provide your data to anybody even when requested or forced — we just don’t have it.
This part should have an asterisk and a link to the notifications section, since your systems will be able to see some metadata and data of the messages, and we don’t know how long that’s retained and what kind of backup systems those might end up in for a long duration.
”Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. Typical applications include the certification of properties of programming languages (e.g. the CompCert compiler certification project, the Verified Software Toolchain for verification of C programs, or the Iris framework for concurrent separation logic), the formalization of mathematics (e.g. the full formalization of the Feit-Thompson theorem, or homotopy type theory), and teaching.”
You can easily copy my comment into Google Translate. An app available on the web, iOS and Android, free of charge.
I can't use this chat app (to my knowledge) to communicate with friends using this app without spending a lot of money to buy an iPhone or Mac.
It's also impractical for me to provide my comment in every popular language in the world. Its even more so impractical to write every comment in a multilingual way. There are two major phone platforms and it's not an onerous ongoing obligation to provide chat apps for each platform.
I just want to point out, as someone who's spent a lot of time in the mobile space and worked behind the scenes on some of the most widely used apps out there...
If you see an iOS only app, it's because Android users don't pay.
Sometimes you just need money to make things work, especially when one of your core goals is not needed external funding. Not everyone can get a 50 million dollar grant...
Also you should definitely elaborate on this because it sounds wrong:
> Apple offer APIs which make it easy for app developers to exclude and fragment
No idea what that's supposed to mean, and sounds like strange Apple bashing.
Closest thing I can think of is maybe iMessage apps? But that's a terrible example since the equivalent functionality on other messaging platforms also needs to be messenger specific, that's just kind of core to how they function?
I mean let's look into some of the claims on the "Facts" page and compare them to Messages, which all Apple users already have.
'Tact is a chat app for families, friends, coworkers, or any other small closed groups of humans. Tact is based on iCloud and works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.' Messages.app does that.
'What can I do with Tact? Start private 1:1 and group chats with other people. Send long or short text messages. Send pictures and files. Like the messages and pictures that others have sent. See rich link previews. Communicate shared mood with chat emoji.' Messages.app does that.
'Values. The chat apps used in the western world today by most users are owned by Facebook, funded by advertising, and treating their users and their data as a product and resource to be harvested. We oppose that, and think there are other ways to enable our relations and communications that do not require compromising our integrity, harvesting our data, or funding the work from advertising.' Principles which are fully compatible with Messages.app
'Technology. Most communication apps are cross-platform, designed for the lowest common denominator in terms of both technology and privacy. We only have interest in the Apple platforms and ecosystem. We think there is a better way, and a higher bar.' Short sighted, and Messages.app does that.
'You are the customer. Unlike many apps that harvest user data for advertising and the advertiser pays, our real customer is you. There is no “advertiser” or anybody else in the model. You pay us for the product, and we are accountable only to you.' Messages.app does that.
I guess you get this one, partially:
'We don’t store or use your data. When you use Tact, your data moves from your device directly to Apple iCloud servers. We have no access to it, and thus no way or intent to use it to show you advertising, or do anything else with it.' Messages.app doesn't do that, but you never explain how I would get anyone I know to use this given the rest.
But you follow it with this:
'You say you store my content in Apple iCloud. Does that mean that I have to trust Apple? Yes.' Messages.app does that.
It probably sounds like I'm just being a negative jerk, but seriously, I cannot see anything about this that says "yes, try this". It feels like yet another "cool people whose podcasts you listen to are using this, you are missing out" kind of thing that will die, hard.
Why in the world would you subscribe to the "way" of a multi billion dollar corporation that pivots to wherever the money is in $(current year)? What a waste of money and time
So what is the exact sequence of events when attempting to chat with someone for the first time?
Validation of new peers is a notoriously nasty usability issue. When both ends have access to the device contacts, then, in cases that matter the most (when people already know each other), it can be done transparently, because both sides will have each other on their contact lists. The friction is zero. No access to the contacts = the need to manually sort legit contact requests from spam. Hence the question. What is it like with Tact?
Also, as others have said, the fact that all goes through Apple makes Tact no different from iMessage. Perhaps I miss something obvious, but I literally see no reason to switch.
Additionally, taking Apple's privacy claims at their face value is a very naive thing to do, leave alone basing your product on them. At the very least whatever is getting stored in iCloud needs to be encrypted with the key that doesn't leave the device. That would make a good difference worthy of a switch - an iMessage clone running on Apple's infrastructure with Apple excluded from the loop.
Note also that we don’t provide a way to discover other users. This means that you can only connect with people with whom you already have a connection through some other real-life or online channel.
This is also my answer to the validation of peers - it must happen out of band, outside of Tact. We currently don’t provide any answer to it in the product.
Cool! I was hoping group chat would be a link I could share here like direct message. Alas it’s not! Group messaging is an underserved need in Whatsapp etc., could be a good place to focus and reducing friction to onramp
Thank you for the idea. We haven’t yet built “share a link to directly join a group” but it fits well with the vision and we’ll do it, just didn’t make the initial public beta scope.
62 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadJaanus, one of the founders of Tact also wrote a longer piece of what Tact is and is not — https://jaanus.com/tact-public-beta/
OTH, if you know people using both iOS and Android, then a chat app that can only talk to some of your friends is just not very practical.
I see this single platform thing play out over and over again with regard to communication and I just don't get it.
I know the two ecosystems are very different from a development perspective. Don't shoot the messenger but I think supporting both has kinda become the defacto price for entry nowadays into the *communication* market space. Communicating half way is really no communication at all --- for me anyway.
As one of the makers of Tact, I’ll say that we have mountains of writing on the site on this, which we haven’t really condensed into short bulletproof messaging yet. I’ll say this as a short version:
It’s my opinion or world view that choosing your digital platform these days comes with very long strings attached, privacy and business model being the most relevant ones. I believe in the “Apple way” more than I belive in the “Android way”. (Also add desktop to the mix.)
Tact intends to appeal to the people who share the same world view. I don’t plan to appeal to everyone.
I recognize it’s all just that: an opinion. I don’t claim mine is the only one, or even the right one. I’m not really going to argue or fight about it. I’m glad there’s a lot of choice. I want to provide more choice in the communications space, and provide an option that perhaps some like-minded people have been missing.
Hope you don't mind an observation --- your motivation seems based on ideology as much as if not more so than practicality.
Good luck with the project.
I believe that Apple’s true incentive is to sell their own devices and services to users and businesses, and let developers like Tact participate in the app economy to possibly get a small piece of that.
Google is an ad company. This is why I am as suspicious of Android as many people here are of Apple. What business is Google in, at the end of the day? Who is the product, and who is the customer?
I mentioned desktop because when we operate in the Apple universe, the devices and software all come from the same place, with the same philosophy, for better or worse. When you use e.g a Windows desktop and an Android device, now you suddenly have two separate universes, philosophies and privacy attitudes to figure out. I think Microsoft is doing a great job. They are not in the business of actively abusing you as ad-driven businesses are but their main focus is enterprise and platforms these days because that’s where the money is.
So for quite a while, we had this joke, “we should make our own chat app”. Of course. That’s all it was, just a joke. But the thought kept nagging me until I did a thought experiment. “What if… it was not a joke?” What would it take? Knowing that I had no time and no money to put into it, what kind of chat app would and could I make? The thought experiment very quickly led me to iCloud that provides two vital services–users and backend.
So for past many months, we had a functional technical experiment of Tact trying to answer the question, is it possible to build Tact on iCloud like this? To date, I haven’t seen any evidence that it wouldn’t be possible.
That’s where Tact comes from. We realize there are many chat apps already out there. We aim to provide some extra choice and an option that we think should exist, but hasn’t. Here’s my subjective list of why I think Tact is different.
- Apple only.
- Straight from your device to iCloud. We never see your data.
- No ads. No data harvesting. No other weird shady things. Everything clean and honest, just as you see on our site.
- No new user account. You just use your iCloud account.
- No discovery. No one will bother you with unwanted “connection requests”.
- No private data access. We don’t ask for any data access on your device, or phone number, or anything.
- Great media experience. Share any media or files, even large. Neat web previews.
- Great desktop app.
- No funding. Completely bootstrapped indie for now. We only answer to our own conscience and personal savings. No pressure for quick growth.
It’s just that I’m in a geographical area where blue tick - green tick didn’t become a thing and people use other messaging apps which are better than iMessage by light years; and that’s good.
Anyway, is it possible that OP was pointing to iMessage simply being inferior? And it is inferior, just like pretty much any online service from Apple. And Apple’s recent convoluted u-turn on privacy.
But still, yeah, “dignity” is too strong a term to be used in this context maybe.
Messages and Tact come from the same place in that both aim to just enable people to communicate, without any further sinister or degrading motive.
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Speaking of iMessage... that's already a thing, and it's already an Apple-only chat platform. Not sure what Tact brings to the world if it's also Apple-only. Based on OP's description (looks like it's pinned as the first comment and can't be replied to), Tact seems like "iMessage, but not as good".
Might be tricker for a chat app tho…
However, you maybe missed the message wars I, II, and III starting back in ~1997.
As an Android user and software dev, realize the biggest motivation would be to reduce friction across "borders".
The 2nd bone of contentiin is having 8 excited to pay and 2 whom do not. This goes back to the common denominator.
You must eliminate friction and while noble ideals, Telegram, Signal and others have a heck of a headstart even outside of iMessage.
As an idea...make it decentralized and autonomous. Think this is happening in a couple web3 projects, but building aessage framework that could live for 100yrs without updates would be interesting.
There's so many of them already, I have heavy app fatigue :) I would really want something that reduces the number of chat apps, not adds one. (Like Beeper and Element One are doing based on Matrix).
However I wish you luck! Hope it works out.
Pros, Concerns, and Ideas:
First the pros:
(1)Your product looks clean.
(2)Your heart is definitely in the right place.
(3)I really like what you wrote in your posts here.
(4)It sounds like an experienced team that is passionate.
Concerns:
(1) Apple's 180 on respecting a user's endpoint security and privacy this year.
(2) Security conscious users might soon start migrating away from Apple.
(3) Hitching your boat to Apple locks out the vast majority of potential users.
(4) The landscape of chat apps in 2021 is way different than when Skype came about... Discord is a beast that was built on just MariaDB after a few months of development time and scaled to 100 million users, using only a few terrabytes of data before doing a major re-write of the code switching to Cassandra NoSQL. Your users value privacy? Give them a private cloud and allow them the option of getting away from a provider that compromises their endpoints...
Ideas:
(1) Dark mode. Look at Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost.
(2) Support for opensource, self-hosted clouds would give this app a reason to exist. Example -- Nextcloud integration or something as an alternative to iCloud...
(3) Maybe even sell the software as a completely self hosted, E2E thing using something akin to the OMEMO methods.
(4) Design / Designers could help with branding the product more.
Android users don't pay money.
That's a slight overgeneralization of course, but when you look at stats showing Android having a massively larger share of users than iOS, you need to realize the vast majority of the user base will not spend money on a service like this or any others for that matter.
If you narrow it down to people who regularly spend money on apps, iOS is clearly the platform to go with.
And using iCloud means one of the biggest dangers to their financial independence is gone: Having to pay for exponentially more storage to go with exponential growth.
I think the greatest potential of this app thus far is that your development and especially overhead costs have been very low. You may be able to add some functionality that does differentiate it from iMessage and attract a user base.
I like the interface, especially the desktop one. It looks less like a messaging app and more like a note-taking or collaborative app, not sure if that indicates the direction you want to go.
I agree with your “note-taking or collaborative” sentiment. We aim to provide a different experience from many other chat apps. More… calm? Professional? Boring? Serious? Respectful? We haven’t quite figured out the adjectives, but yes, it is intentional.
Email can obviously cover that but is very multi-purpose and not necessarily ideal either.
Then there are apps like Slack or Discord, but those aren’t exactly the same either (and are server-based.)
If so, I wonder if you'd get a warmer reception if you explained this. It's an interesting feature of iCloud that really isn't replicated anywhere else and is actually very cool.
I considered building an application like this awhile back when I realized how you could make the invitation links cleaner than the default ways iCloud handles it, but the landscape felt too crowded for one person. I like the design and approach though - good luck!
I agree it is an interesting feature, works well, and I wonder why aren’t more apps built with that. Perhaps one reason is that the developer experience is somewhat esoteric. It took me quite a while to figure out how it all works and how to put all the pieces together.
By the way, I actually open sourced my work on this some time ago: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/cloudkit-sane-sharing
I had a few members of the iCloud team reach out after that to see if I wanted to interview with them. Without saying too much, I think they definitely are aware it could be used more widely... such a shame, it's a very well designed system yet gets the blanket "it's custom Apple built so thus it's odd junk" label.
But later on in the same page, the following promise is made under the “Harm Reduction” section:
> Straight to Apple servers. Tact does not store your messages, files, photos, or any other data. They are stored only on Apple servers, and we as the makers of Tact have no access to them. We cannot provide your data to anybody even when requested or forced — we just don’t have it.
This part should have an asterisk and a link to the notifications section, since your systems will be able to see some metadata and data of the messages, and we don’t know how long that’s retained and what kind of backup systems those might end up in for a long duration.
There is no reason to have any faith in Apple's endpoint or cloud security.
> No results
No bueno.
Nitpick though, with:
> “Provably correct. We aim for our code to be provably correct; that is, covered by automated testing.”
Generally, ‘provably correct’ implies formal proofs e.g. ‘formal reasoning’, rather than test coverage.
See: https://coq.inria.fr/
”Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. Typical applications include the certification of properties of programming languages (e.g. the CompCert compiler certification project, the Verified Software Toolchain for verification of C programs, or the Iris framework for concurrent separation logic), the formalization of mathematics (e.g. the full formalization of the Feit-Thompson theorem, or homotopy type theory), and teaching.”
You can easily copy my comment into Google Translate. An app available on the web, iOS and Android, free of charge.
I can't use this chat app (to my knowledge) to communicate with friends using this app without spending a lot of money to buy an iPhone or Mac.
It's also impractical for me to provide my comment in every popular language in the world. Its even more so impractical to write every comment in a multilingual way. There are two major phone platforms and it's not an onerous ongoing obligation to provide chat apps for each platform.
If you see an iOS only app, it's because Android users don't pay.
Sometimes you just need money to make things work, especially when one of your core goals is not needed external funding. Not everyone can get a 50 million dollar grant...
Also you should definitely elaborate on this because it sounds wrong:
> Apple offer APIs which make it easy for app developers to exclude and fragment
No idea what that's supposed to mean, and sounds like strange Apple bashing.
Closest thing I can think of is maybe iMessage apps? But that's a terrible example since the equivalent functionality on other messaging platforms also needs to be messenger specific, that's just kind of core to how they function?
Serious question, I can't fathom the reason for this.
'Tact is a chat app for families, friends, coworkers, or any other small closed groups of humans. Tact is based on iCloud and works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.' Messages.app does that.
'What can I do with Tact? Start private 1:1 and group chats with other people. Send long or short text messages. Send pictures and files. Like the messages and pictures that others have sent. See rich link previews. Communicate shared mood with chat emoji.' Messages.app does that.
'Values. The chat apps used in the western world today by most users are owned by Facebook, funded by advertising, and treating their users and their data as a product and resource to be harvested. We oppose that, and think there are other ways to enable our relations and communications that do not require compromising our integrity, harvesting our data, or funding the work from advertising.' Principles which are fully compatible with Messages.app
'Technology. Most communication apps are cross-platform, designed for the lowest common denominator in terms of both technology and privacy. We only have interest in the Apple platforms and ecosystem. We think there is a better way, and a higher bar.' Short sighted, and Messages.app does that.
'You are the customer. Unlike many apps that harvest user data for advertising and the advertiser pays, our real customer is you. There is no “advertiser” or anybody else in the model. You pay us for the product, and we are accountable only to you.' Messages.app does that.
I guess you get this one, partially: 'We don’t store or use your data. When you use Tact, your data moves from your device directly to Apple iCloud servers. We have no access to it, and thus no way or intent to use it to show you advertising, or do anything else with it.' Messages.app doesn't do that, but you never explain how I would get anyone I know to use this given the rest.
But you follow it with this: 'You say you store my content in Apple iCloud. Does that mean that I have to trust Apple? Yes.' Messages.app does that.
It probably sounds like I'm just being a negative jerk, but seriously, I cannot see anything about this that says "yes, try this". It feels like yet another "cool people whose podcasts you listen to are using this, you are missing out" kind of thing that will die, hard.
Validation of new peers is a notoriously nasty usability issue. When both ends have access to the device contacts, then, in cases that matter the most (when people already know each other), it can be done transparently, because both sides will have each other on their contact lists. The friction is zero. No access to the contacts = the need to manually sort legit contact requests from spam. Hence the question. What is it like with Tact?
Also, as others have said, the fact that all goes through Apple makes Tact no different from iMessage. Perhaps I miss something obvious, but I literally see no reason to switch.
Additionally, taking Apple's privacy claims at their face value is a very naive thing to do, leave alone basing your product on them. At the very least whatever is getting stored in iCloud needs to be encrypted with the key that doesn't leave the device. That would make a good difference worthy of a switch - an iMessage clone running on Apple's infrastructure with Apple excluded from the loop.
This is also my answer to the validation of peers - it must happen out of band, outside of Tact. We currently don’t provide any answer to it in the product.
>iCloud
Choose one
https://go.justtact.com/1on1/4vJF3Kw4jKmSfScEv1UryH?from=Kar...