

Show HN: Couple, a shared diary for you and the one you love - kunle
http://www.getcouple.com

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petenixey
If I were running one of these apps I have to say I would be terrified of
being hacked. There will be a lot of explicit pictures exchanged between
couples, including teens and a lot of people who will spend a lot of effort to
get those photos behind their paywall.

~~~
fomojola
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.

------
rgbrgb
I'm a bit lost on why you would want to use this rather than regular
sms/iMessage. There's clearly a market for this kind of thing (WhatsApp), but
could somebody explain why?

~~~
kunle
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.

------
kunle
Hey everyone - Ayo from Hipmob here. We released Couple as our first open-
source chat project. The focus is to show any developer how to build a user-
to-user messaging app using Hipmob's libraries - we'd love any comments,
suggestions or feedback! (ayo at hipmob.com) - sorry this isn't reflected in
the title.

~~~
mst
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 :)

~~~
kunle
Ayo from Hipmob here. You make fair points (I've actually had a number of
conversations specifically about this in the last couple of weeks)
particularly in light of some recent political scandals. I have you thought
through what an alternate (non poly) app/language set would look like? How
would you describe it to the people who it's for? (Asking for my edification -
such apps would be trivial to build on Hipmob, so if we're going to do it, I'd
welcome some feedback on how - can discuss here or ping me at ayo at hipmob
dot com.

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fluidcruft
Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy when using these sorts of things?
I think something like this could be fun, but it seems like a party line.

~~~
fomojola
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.

~~~
fluidcruft
Mostly employees snooping and the types of warrentless government
backdoors/fishing/cooperation that seems to be en vogue.

------
miriamrach
I wish this worked with one partner on a smartphone and the other on a
dumbphone.

~~~
fomojola
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.

~~~
miriamrach
Thanks, that sounds like it could work really well. We both have unlimited
text messaging, so the per-message costs wouldn't be a problem in our specific
case.

I am having trouble finding your email... could you be a little more specific
about how I can find it? Thanks!

