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"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever. It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/tex

"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever. It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. It seems like it's the default goto for anyone that can't think of something more interesting these days.

fizx 12y ago
We didn't need yet another IRC clone, and yet Slack seems to be cleaning up. The core value prop of the internet is easy communication. Don't be surprised when people continue to iterate on it.
- wamatt 12y ago
  To be fair, Slack is much more than simply an IRC clone
  - hueving 12y ago
    Right, because most IRC clones are free
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Well, it apparently is a poor man's IRC clone with awesome UI bolted on top. I think a properly made modern IRC client would blow it out of the water.
- hackerboos 12y ago
  Slack was doing it for me until recently. I could paste code and it would format it correctly. It looked great although a bit sluggish at times. Then I tried to share a Pages document...
  - coldtea 12y ago
    So? Even if it turned out badly, that's one bug for a rather obscure use case that can be fixed anyway...
- e12e 12y ago
  Slack does support IRC and XMPP transports, though? So even if $management wants Slack, I can use a single client across several networks. AFAIK Slack doesn't do federation, but one out of two, is better than none out of two.
onion2k 12y ago
Everyone thinks we don't need another one until they see one that does something they like but hadn't realised would be useful. WhatsApp with its free messages, Twitter with its enforced terseness, Snapchat with its take on ephemerality - they were all adopted by millions of users who, before seeing the app, would probably have declared they didn't need a new messaging app. Yet they installed it, tried it, and continued to use it. People will always want to try new ways to message one another. Consequently we'll always get new messaging apps.
- willlma 12y ago
  I agree. But what's the feature here? I lament the audio quality of cell phone calls, but audio quality depends on bandwidth, and this requires an internet connection, which is going to be spotty depending on location and when transitioning from data to wifi. Every feature here seems a marginal improvement on what already exists (audio quality, UI, sync, security, battery use). No new concepts. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to use it, but I don't see an impetus for mass adoption.
  - egeozcan 12y ago
    My understanding is that it has inline content like Whatsapp and desktop support & sync features like Skype (Skype took a lot to make the sync at least tolerable - but I guess they already know what they're doing). The supposedly high quality of the calls and inline 3rd party content support (soundcloud and youtube for now, I suppose) are the bonus features.
- Kronopath 12y ago
  Twitter's success wasn't due to "enforced terseness", it was due to the fact that it supported posting to it from SMS messages back when the majority of the population still had dumbphones. Once smartphones became ubiquitous, Twitter kept riding that wave due to network effects. In fact, the entire reason for the 140-character limit was so that it could interoperate with SMS cleanly. I do somewhat agree with your overall point though. And it's worth noting that sometimes that "new feature" can be things like "my parents don't use it yet", in the case of teenagers and the like.
blueskin_ 12y ago
Agreed. What we need is a protocol people can make clients for. With end to end encryption and PFS, of course.
- MildlySerious 12y ago
  That's what Tox is aiming for. http://tox.im/ http://tox.im/
  - rakoo 12y ago
    That's what XMPP is already doing.
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      Does XMPP support video? Edit: yes. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ is the kind of situation we need to avoid.
      - andor 12y ago
        XMPP/Jingle worked, although the quality wasn't very good. You could make video calls between Google Talk (also on Android) and Empathy, the standard GNOME XMPP Client.
      - makomk 12y ago
        Yes, XMPP supports video. It even has several incompatible ways of supporting video to choose from, most of them called Jingle.
    - emsy 12y ago
      I usually dislike introducing yet another standard, but Tox has some features that XMPP won't provide. VoIP support out of the box, without the need for an extension that may not be supported by the client. Also, afaik it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication.
kristofferR 12y ago
I really disagree. There's simply no good secure cross-platform messaging app available. Telegram has fantastic clients on all the platforms, but isn't secure. TextSecure is secure, but has only a mediocre app on a single platform (Android). The other alternatives are even worse. Tox is looking really promising though: https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ
- Pamar 12y ago
  What about Threema? (https://threema.ch/en https://threema.ch/en)
  - kristofferR 12y ago
    It's not cross-platform unfortunately, it's only on mobile devices.
  - lmedinas 12y ago
    tbh I trust on Threema the same way I trust on Whatsapp or any other client which promises encryption. Threema is closed sourced and thus I don't know which/how encryption are they actually using.
- bugsbunny123 12y ago
  Telegram isn't secure? Source please.
  - JonoBB 12y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686868
  - hucker 12y ago
    http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-cryptanalysis-contest http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta... Also, messages are not encrypted by default, and there is afaik no way to encrypt group chats. You have to create a special "secret" chat for the messages to be encrypted.
sspiff 12y ago
Exactly. Right now, I have installed on my phone: * Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone. * Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly) * Viber, with a single contact. * LINE, with a single contact. I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps. 3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Yeah, totally agree, but looks that users always like to see the wheel being reinvented. It's kind of depressing, why fix what's not broken ?
  - allan_ 12y ago
    I don't think users really want the wheel to be reinvented. More like companies try to lock you in on their tech and make money with you. Fragmentation? CEO gives a shit.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      Well, I rarely see users refuse to install an application even though it does the same thing as another one. That's part of the problem.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - vidarh 12y ago
    You're assuming things are not broken. Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.
- 12y ago
grey-area 12y ago
I disagree. The current situation with voice and text is insane; telephone companies still try to own that space and charge for things like SMS/receiving calls, even though it's becoming increasingly obvious that it makes far more sense to send messaging over the internet rather than via custom infrastructure. No-one wants cell phone/telephone operators to be anything more than a dumb pipe apart from them. Apps like this are the future, but nobody has quite hit the perfect spot yet in terms of features and adoption (adoption probably being most important, or some method of piggy-backing on existing services like email/SMS/mobile nos). I had a look at this and it looks pretty good but the first-run experience just isn't there yet. I don't trust some random company with my address book, certainly not on first-run, so I'm not in an empty app wondering what to do. That's far from ideal and will probably be their biggest problem.
dirtyaura 12y ago
There is no properly working cross platform mobile video chat yet, because it's a hard problem. All innovation in this space is welcome. Wire started without video, but I'm pretty sure that it is in their long-term plans.
coldtea 12y ago
>"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever. The usual negative HN top post. I have to disagree. We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now), so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one. >It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only). And we're ways before coming up with the "be all end all" messaging app, so there's plenty of room for innovation in the area. In general this comment reminds me of the "640K should be enough for everybody" quote...
- graeme 12y ago
  I've been in Brazil for the past five weeks. EVERYONE uses whatsapp, because SMS is expensive. And this all happened in the past couple of years or so, because that's when smartphones became widespread. I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". Make a good enough messaging app, and you can win an entire country. Or the world.
  - matwood 12y ago
    I have never used Whatsapp in the US. The sole purpose I have it on my phone is for communicating with AirBnb hosts when traveling abroad. It is amazing how Whatsapp rose everywhere but in the US.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". But your "whatsapp" is your phone number.
    - rogeryu 12y ago
      You don't understand. People don't associate that number with a phonecall, but with Whatsapp.
      - 12y ago
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I feel that sentiment. It's not that I mind people doing new apps in already crowded market segments - it's that messaging apps, like social networking sites, work on network effect. I don't want a new messaging app for the same reason I don't want a new Facebook - the existing one is awesome enough, new ones don't offer anything interesting, and I definitely don't feel like rebuilding my contact lists every other year. In this way, a new app is a danger not only to the maker of an old app, it's a danger to the client as well.
snowwrestler 12y ago
For me, the ultimate Skype killer is Skype. It's gone from a messaging app that I couldn't believe worked so well on a low-speed connection, to a messaging app that that I can't believe works so shitty on a high-speed connection. I literally tried for 20 minutes just to get a call to connect last Saturday before giving up and using FaceTime instead.
free2rhyme214 12y ago
I agree with you 100%. Right when I saw Wire I was like, "Oh great I have to download another messaging app and convince people to use it." No thanks. I already use iMessage, Hangouts, Line, and Skype at work. There's too many messengers and they all do the same thing. Wire is not a 10x improvement. Maybe like a 0.0015 improvement which won't even convince me to download it. The call quality with Skype and other services is decent, making it slightly better with a cleaner UI won't do much.

fizx 12y ago

We didn't need yet another IRC clone, and yet Slack seems to be cleaning up. The core value prop of the internet is easy communication. Don't be surprised when people continue to iterate on it.

wamatt 12y ago
To be fair, Slack is much more than simply an IRC clone
- hueving 12y ago
  Right, because most IRC clones are free
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Well, it apparently is a poor man's IRC clone with awesome UI bolted on top. I think a properly made modern IRC client would blow it out of the water.
hackerboos 12y ago
Slack was doing it for me until recently. I could paste code and it would format it correctly. It looked great although a bit sluggish at times. Then I tried to share a Pages document...
- coldtea 12y ago
  So? Even if it turned out badly, that's one bug for a rather obscure use case that can be fixed anyway...
e12e 12y ago
Slack does support IRC and XMPP transports, though? So even if $management wants Slack, I can use a single client across several networks. AFAIK Slack doesn't do federation, but one out of two, is better than none out of two.

onion2k 12y ago

Everyone thinks we don't need another one until they see one that does something they like but hadn't realised would be useful. WhatsApp with its free messages, Twitter with its enforced terseness, Snapchat with its take on ephemerality - they were all adopted by millions of users who, before seeing the app, would probably have declared they didn't need a new messaging app. Yet they installed it, tried it, and continued to use it. People will always want to try new ways to message one another. Consequently we'll always get new messaging apps.

willlma 12y ago
I agree. But what's the feature here? I lament the audio quality of cell phone calls, but audio quality depends on bandwidth, and this requires an internet connection, which is going to be spotty depending on location and when transitioning from data to wifi. Every feature here seems a marginal improvement on what already exists (audio quality, UI, sync, security, battery use). No new concepts. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to use it, but I don't see an impetus for mass adoption.
- egeozcan 12y ago
  My understanding is that it has inline content like Whatsapp and desktop support & sync features like Skype (Skype took a lot to make the sync at least tolerable - but I guess they already know what they're doing). The supposedly high quality of the calls and inline 3rd party content support (soundcloud and youtube for now, I suppose) are the bonus features.
Kronopath 12y ago
Twitter's success wasn't due to "enforced terseness", it was due to the fact that it supported posting to it from SMS messages back when the majority of the population still had dumbphones. Once smartphones became ubiquitous, Twitter kept riding that wave due to network effects. In fact, the entire reason for the 140-character limit was so that it could interoperate with SMS cleanly. I do somewhat agree with your overall point though. And it's worth noting that sometimes that "new feature" can be things like "my parents don't use it yet", in the case of teenagers and the like.

blueskin_ 12y ago

Agreed. What we need is a protocol people can make clients for. With end to end encryption and PFS, of course.

MildlySerious 12y ago
That's what Tox is aiming for. http://tox.im/ http://tox.im/
- rakoo 12y ago
  That's what XMPP is already doing.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Does XMPP support video? Edit: yes. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ is the kind of situation we need to avoid.
    - andor 12y ago
      XMPP/Jingle worked, although the quality wasn't very good. You could make video calls between Google Talk (also on Android) and Empathy, the standard GNOME XMPP Client.
    - makomk 12y ago
      Yes, XMPP supports video. It even has several incompatible ways of supporting video to choose from, most of them called Jingle.
  - emsy 12y ago
    I usually dislike introducing yet another standard, but Tox has some features that XMPP won't provide. VoIP support out of the box, without the need for an extension that may not be supported by the client. Also, afaik it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication.

kristofferR 12y ago

I really disagree. There's simply no good secure cross-platform messaging app available. Telegram has fantastic clients on all the platforms, but isn't secure. TextSecure is secure, but has only a mediocre app on a single platform (Android). The other alternatives are even worse. Tox is looking really promising though: https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ

Pamar 12y ago
What about Threema? (https://threema.ch/en https://threema.ch/en)
- kristofferR 12y ago
  It's not cross-platform unfortunately, it's only on mobile devices.
- lmedinas 12y ago
  tbh I trust on Threema the same way I trust on Whatsapp or any other client which promises encryption. Threema is closed sourced and thus I don't know which/how encryption are they actually using.
bugsbunny123 12y ago
Telegram isn't secure? Source please.
- JonoBB 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686868
- hucker 12y ago
  http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-cryptanalysis-contest http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta... Also, messages are not encrypted by default, and there is afaik no way to encrypt group chats. You have to create a special "secret" chat for the messages to be encrypted.

sspiff 12y ago

Exactly. Right now, I have installed on my phone: * Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone. * Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly) * Viber, with a single contact. * LINE, with a single contact. I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps. 3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.

ekianjo 12y ago
Yeah, totally agree, but looks that users always like to see the wheel being reinvented. It's kind of depressing, why fix what's not broken ?
- allan_ 12y ago
  I don't think users really want the wheel to be reinvented. More like companies try to lock you in on their tech and make money with you. Fragmentation? CEO gives a shit.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    Well, I rarely see users refuse to install an application even though it does the same thing as another one. That's part of the problem.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- vidarh 12y ago
  You're assuming things are not broken. Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.
12y ago

grey-area 12y ago

I disagree. The current situation with voice and text is insane; telephone companies still try to own that space and charge for things like SMS/receiving calls, even though it's becoming increasingly obvious that it makes far more sense to send messaging over the internet rather than via custom infrastructure. No-one wants cell phone/telephone operators to be anything more than a dumb pipe apart from them. Apps like this are the future, but nobody has quite hit the perfect spot yet in terms of features and adoption (adoption probably being most important, or some method of piggy-backing on existing services like email/SMS/mobile nos). I had a look at this and it looks pretty good but the first-run experience just isn't there yet. I don't trust some random company with my address book, certainly not on first-run, so I'm not in an empty app wondering what to do. That's far from ideal and will probably be their biggest problem.

dirtyaura 12y ago

There is no properly working cross platform mobile video chat yet, because it's a hard problem. All innovation in this space is welcome. Wire started without video, but I'm pretty sure that it is in their long-term plans.

coldtea 12y ago

>"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever. The usual negative HN top post. I have to disagree. We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now), so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one. >It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only). And we're ways before coming up with the "be all end all" messaging app, so there's plenty of room for innovation in the area. In general this comment reminds me of the "640K should be enough for everybody" quote...

graeme 12y ago
I've been in Brazil for the past five weeks. EVERYONE uses whatsapp, because SMS is expensive. And this all happened in the past couple of years or so, because that's when smartphones became widespread. I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". Make a good enough messaging app, and you can win an entire country. Or the world.
- matwood 12y ago
  I have never used Whatsapp in the US. The sole purpose I have it on my phone is for communicating with AirBnb hosts when traveling abroad. It is amazing how Whatsapp rose everywhere but in the US.
- danieldk 12y ago
  I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". But your "whatsapp" is your phone number.
  - rogeryu 12y ago
    You don't understand. People don't associate that number with a phonecall, but with Whatsapp.
    - 12y ago

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I feel that sentiment. It's not that I mind people doing new apps in already crowded market segments - it's that messaging apps, like social networking sites, work on network effect. I don't want a new messaging app for the same reason I don't want a new Facebook - the existing one is awesome enough, new ones don't offer anything interesting, and I definitely don't feel like rebuilding my contact lists every other year. In this way, a new app is a danger not only to the maker of an old app, it's a danger to the client as well.

snowwrestler 12y ago

For me, the ultimate Skype killer is Skype. It's gone from a messaging app that I couldn't believe worked so well on a low-speed connection, to a messaging app that that I can't believe works so shitty on a high-speed connection. I literally tried for 20 minutes just to get a call to connect last Saturday before giving up and using FaceTime instead.

free2rhyme214 12y ago

I agree with you 100%. Right when I saw Wire I was like, "Oh great I have to download another messaging app and convince people to use it." No thanks. I already use iMessage, Hangouts, Line, and Skype at work. There's too many messengers and they all do the same thing. Wire is not a 10x improvement. Maybe like a 0.0015 improvement which won't even convince me to download it. The call quality with Skype and other services is decent, making it slightly better with a cleaner UI won't do much.