> for less than like the price of one streaming service or two cups of coffee a month, you’ll get something that you’ll be able to use for hours a day
I really hate when people say that. Just say in obvious terms. If you can find the value of getting such messaging app in one place is worth $15 for you, then thr price might be suitable for you, give it a try.
That is way more respectful marketing. I really am coffee addicted (by virtue of being a physicist) and my monthly coffee consumption doesn't cost me that much because I don't drink cofee at inflated places with brand names. I make them home and in my office like any normal person.
Maybe it's just another apparition of that meme where Americans will use anything except the metric system: deer as tall as a bicycle, sinkhole the size of six washing machines, distance of at least an alligator...
That's hilarious. :) To the OP, I don't even drink coffee, I drink tea! So I should probably come up with better analogies. But I'm very sensitive to the fact, especially in the social media and messaging space, that people aren't accustomed to paying for things and so it's a big lift to get them to value it correctly. (For example on Tumblr everyone said they'd pay for no ads in surveys, when we launched the upgrade it got like a 0.02% conversion. Twitter Blue has had the same challenges.)
Superhuman really broke open people paying a significant amount (30/mo) for communication, which I think is awesome for the industry.
FWIW I paid for (and even gifted) no-ads because I don't like ads but enjoy Tumblr and I'm fine with the folks who blaze as long they don't get my data. I perceived Blue as a simple gimmick, no use for that. I wonder how much overlap there is between blue and no-ads... but anyway, people should slowly get used to pay again for services important to them, like we had once the shareware model.
Sorry but you don’t know the “american tv metric system”, large items lenghts are measured in “football fields” and weighted in “elephants” or “boeing 747s” small items in “human hairs”.
I also know what I’m getting with my 2 cups of coffee. It’s worth a lot to me. I’m refreshed, energized and ready to be productive and get twice as much done! On the other hand, I’m not sure your app/tool has the same effect. Like I would never give up my coffee to use your tool, if I had a gun to my head. logically, your tool should be worth 1/10 the cost of my coffee!
For the cost of just two or three thousand cups of coffee a month, you could easily afford all the subscription services you want that compare themselves to the price of coffee!
Also, I don't use the services that they're combining for hours a day anyways? So I have a hard time seeing why I would with Texts. And for 50¢/day... I can switch between a couple tabs every once in a while.
Coffee price comparisons always feel a bit odd. I have some control over the price I pay for coffee, how often I drink it, it's quality, if I want to stop paying for it for a while etc. It has no financial equivalent to paying for 12 months in advance for a subscription service.
I don't think about how many coffee's my climbing gym subscription is worth, it has it's own value to me. I think this reflects a core difference between most buyers and sellers. The sellers often see money for what it is: fungible; where the buyer usually engages with a sale at a much more emotional level, even if practicalities are taken into account.
You are by your own admission not waiting in line at a cafe every morning. As someone that DID for a while, let me assure you that there are plenty of “normal” people that do.
I never understood people not getting a coffee machine with an alarm to make coffee that is ready for them when they get up. It costs about 2 weeks worth of starbucks large coffees and lasts at least 10 years before something breaks.
The kind of person that'd pay for the convenience and productivity gain of a centralized messaging app isn't likely to care about saving money by brewing coffee at home and avoiding coffee brands.
Or in another universe. This person know where to put his money. So if I am more productive and get time saving effort and time by a tool, I will use it. And actually making coffee at home/office saves more time not only money. And you can get it whenever you want in a 5 minutes max.
Ironically I am using their main competitor, beeper.
It acts as a linked device, and you are interfacing directly with Signal's servers with the same protocol that their desktop and mobile applications use.
> Texts is an app for all your messaging apps. You can use it to log in to WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and more and see and respond to all your messages in one place.
Sigh
So it's Pidgim for mobile phones basically?
I think Wordpress was a one-hit-wonder for historical reasons, but I don't see much value in this
I did a find before posting my comment and found yours.
"Cool I like Wordpress. But they bought a fancy Pidgin clone for 50mil...? https://pidgin.im/"
I didn't see the value $50 mill either. My immediate thought is many people use instant messaging but don't call it that they call it texts. The only reason I can see this being even a little popular is because automatic somehow comes out with a nice mobile app which looks to be in development. But also, if they convince people to pay to test. Which looks like they will "Billed yearly". It's an interesting move. I don't think I will be a customer, but I'm curious to see how it pans out.. At a risk of dating myself. I remember when AIM was free, and free video game Demos came in the mail and in magazines. So I don't see how paying for all of these apps that are free makes any sense. I suppose it would be a perfect tool for an individual to messages many people on many different networks with a couple of the baked in features. But man 100+ bucks a year to prevent the information overload that I created seems like not a good spend for me.
I was about to say no it's not like Pidgin because Pidgin doesn't support Whatsapp, Signal, Twitter, etc, but... apparently it does? Anyone know how well this works?
Except maybe that Text actually works? I just tried Pidgin after being away from it for about 10 years. Its discord integration was lacking. It eventually showed some discord channels and some text in them, but it was incredibly spotty and the UI was useless. I walked away believing Pidgin was a dead project because it acts so much like one.
Pidgin is (was?) a niche nerd app that nobody uses anymore. Not everything is about technological advancement. We haven’t had one of these for a while. Certainly not with the new crop of messaging services. Who’s to say that it won’t catch on. Certainly not you.
FAQ says iOS under development and Android on road map. Under what do you support it says:
iMessage (only on macOS), SMS (with iMessage), WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, IRC, Slack and Discord DMs.
It says only on macOS for iMessage. But not for any of the the others even though not on iOS for any of those either. Does this FAQ mean that once iOS app is out it won’t be able to support iMessage? Assuming so, that is pretty major and imagine a major factor for people whether to consider this app if they know it will never support iMessage on iOS because of limitations. That should be clearer in faq.
iOS app is in alpha, it's being internally tested right now.
In the first version of iOS, I don't think we'll be supporting iMessage. Texts runs on your device and not our servers (this is how E2EE is properly supported for example), this comes with some limitations.
We are working on solutions though, it's in the roadmap to support all popular platforms, on all devices.
> In the first version of iOS, I don't think we'll be supporting iMessage.
Isn’t this pretty much impossible as things stand? There is no public API for reading iMessage information and all third-party apps are sandboxed on iOS.
Are you counting on some kind of policy change from Apple?
It's almost guaranteed that iMessage info is being read at the desktop (requires at least one Max) in the hop and relies on the fact that all chat clients don't encrypt at rest.
The minute that changes / the minute further sandboxes come in to prevent reading of the unencrypted chat at rest, these are at risk.
It does seem like even automattic is counting on putting more people into a common address-space before that happens so they can continue to build out their network and support protocols that are platform and device independent.
> "Just as an engineer, I can’t ethically support" the cloud-first model, Mullenweg says.
Beeper includes a web service as part of the deal, so if you're good with that then yeah it'd be better, especially since it's ready now and it the faq you linked says they don't store your chats via the service.
Sounds more like a platform agnostic messaging center, like what Blackberry Hub or the Windows Phone tried to do 10-13 years ago. There was ICQ more than 20 years ago that tried the same thing.
FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Google Chat, all in one app. Of course the walled gardeners hated this and broke the APIs or changed the terms of service until every third party client gave up.
This is something I actively, specifically do not want. There is a reason I silo Discord (nerd hobby shit) from WhatsApp (general conversations with friends and family) from Signal (my more security conscious friends) from FB messenger (acquaintances and Marketplace).
How is a company able to register a generic name like "Texts" as a brand? how was marketing ok with such a name that is impossible to search on google?
Have you tried their new mobile app, [Element X](https://element.io/labs/element-x)? It's still barebones, but I'm impressed by its snappiness and overall look and feel.
Instant messaging is incredibly fragmented, I use Twitter to chat with people I know from the industry, use Instagram to chat with friends, Facebook for family and marketplace stuff, WhatsApp to interact with almost every business.
The fragmentation is actually a feature. Makes it less likely to forward some dumb meme from Instagram to a work colleague when you meant to send it to your friend from college.
Different apps for different social contexts is not such a bad thing.
I assume a lot judging by how many there are and how popular each are and that people want to communicate with everyone. Most of us may have most of our friends on one but then few on others and then at work probably on others. Without mobile apps though assume will be dead on arrival until it is and they might run into road blocks there and of course the platforms I’m sure will find a way to simply block this if gains enough traction and then the app becomes mostly worthless again for most. So while I’d love this and looks like a beautiful Mac app I’m not hopeful unless EU forces everyone to jump on board but then issues with encryption and privacy.
I would happily have paid for Pidgin back in the day.
Currently, I use Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Voice (I'm an American living in the UK, I use Google Voice for my US-based phone number and texting), Facebook Messenger, and occasionally Discord. I'm probably forgetting something, too.
Automattic is becoming a real interesting collection of well-liked/useful/underdog services: WordPress, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Texts. Here's to hoping they continue to do cool things and have some success. The world needs some scrappy alternatives to unicorn-scale enshittification.
They probably use a "ghost" device on their end (e.g.: Beeper with their Macs[1]) or a helper app you install on your Mac to plug into Messages (e.g.: AirMessage[2] with its macOS helper app).
When you compose a new message on iMessage, below the text field where you type your message is a scrolling bar of app icons that can be invoked and do stuff with the message you are creating. Apps can appear here and provide functions.
The built-in Photos app is probably the most used one, typically you open it to create or select a picture to attach.
I'm not sure of the API or what it allows you to do, but it probably uses that same mechanism.
Every day! We have 198 people working on product for WP.com and as part of our Five for the Future commitment have 100 full-time people dedicated to core and community. There are a lot more FTEs in volunteer hours across Automattic being contributed as well. If you haven't checked out WP in a while, look at the latest releases and what's happening with Gutenberg. You can now do things fully in the editor and with patterns that you used to need to custom code or plugins for. WordPress is my first love. (I even have a WordPress ring I wear sometimes!)
That is awesome to hear that you have so many devs dedicated to the project, and that you are still so deeply invested into WordPress. Thank you for everything you have done and created, and most of us probably wouldn’t be here without your software at some point or another in their life.
Thanks for all you do, and keep up the great work of empowering creators everywhere!
Can you imagine if all major websites/services all had their own version of http-esque protocols? Imagine if Microsoft had a protocol only you could use on their devices. Sound familiar yet?
50M for incomplete software using unofficial, brittle connections to third parties that are actively resistant to "unofficial" clients? Sounds like a great deal!
I really hate when people say that. Just say in obvious terms. If you can find the value of getting such messaging app in one place is worth $15 for you, then thr price might be suitable for you, give it a try.
That is way more respectful marketing. I really am coffee addicted (by virtue of being a physicist) and my monthly coffee consumption doesn't cost me that much because I don't drink cofee at inflated places with brand names. I make them home and in my office like any normal person.