
Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything Else on Their Phone - peterschroeder
https://medium.com/@peter.e.schroeder/messaging-is-the-one-thing-people-do-more-than-anything-else-on-their-phone-825e32d3782d#.6l0oyyema
======
henrikschroder
> 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.

~~~
blazespin
Maybe It Is Different This Time. A guy can dream, right?

~~~
pastullo
This guy is gonna make gazillions!

~~~
peterschroeder
:)

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vmarsy
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.

~~~
nxc18
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).

~~~
peterschroeder
I myself have always been an iOS guy, but I can understand your pain from the
transition from 7 to 8!

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JustSomeNobody
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.

~~~
josephg
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)

~~~
JustSomeNobody
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.

~~~
peterschroeder
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! :)

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bamboozled
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.

~~~
peterschroeder
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!

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wodenokoto
That was the main thing since SMS became big in the late 90's. Did Social
network apps ever out-compete messaging if we count SMS as messaging?

Taking about messaging on phones without even mentioning SMS, seems uninformed
to me.

~~~
peterschroeder
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.

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IgorPartola
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.

~~~
chainsaw10
> Why not standardize?

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.

~~~
IgorPartola
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.

~~~
peterschroeder
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.

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peterschroeder
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](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

~~~
wheelerwj
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?

~~~
peterschroeder
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...](https://artplusmarketing.com/can-messaging-replace-
email-a835ec29f839#.buek5dwb0)

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!

------
JustSomeNobody
"All of you messages in one place."[0]

Hmmm... needs editing.

[0][http://www.unummessenger.com/](http://www.unummessenger.com/)

~~~
peterschroeder
Whoops! That last update didn't work out so well.

Thanks for the feedback, I just updated it now! :)

------
asciimo
Welcome to The Future, where humans employ electronic devices to communicate
across vast distances, instantaneously!

~~~
peterschroeder
So true, I love it! We live in a connected world.

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srrrg
This article appeared in a different form (same author) here:
[https://hackernoon.com/one-app-to-rule-them-all-
aa1cba497e62...](https://hackernoon.com/one-app-to-rule-them-all-
aa1cba497e62#.1x31e21re)

~~~
peterschroeder
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!

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NumberCruncher
>>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.

~~~
lgas
That's easy for you to say from behind a keyboard :)

~~~
NumberCruncher
HN is not a messaging app.

And I have a lot of f2f discussions about this, even if I know that most
people feel being offended by my opinion.

~~~
peterschroeder
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.

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analogmemory
Website is offline.

~~~
peterschroeder
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.

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peterschroeder
Thanks for the comments and upvotes everyone! It was pretty cool to be
featured on the front page of Hacker News! :)

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rch
Do you respond to _every_ comment?

~~~
peterschroeder
I do! :)

Feedback is really important to me. I truly enjoy communicating with people. I
gain something from every single conversation I have.

