The app brings all your messaging apps together in a single dashboard, including iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, LinkedIn, Signal, Discord and X, with plans for more in the future, a company blog post announced.
Though other companies have tried to do something similar — like Beeper — Texts.com offers end-to-end encryption of your chats and other features users have always wanted, like the ability to schedule messages at a time that’s convenient for the recipient, not just for you. In addition, you can mark messages as unread even on services that don’t offer that feature, allowing you to remember to check that message again when you return, as well as get summaries of long group chats you’ve missed.
It is certainly a similar approach to Beeper, but different. Beeper dropped their charge per month whilst this service is still $15 pm. The service has iMessage but only on macOS – whilst Beeper offers iMessage across all platforms. However, that is another difference in that Beeper does break the E2EE for iMessage, with that virtual Mac in the middle, which you have the password to.
Beeper also includes full iMessage use on Windows, Linux, and Android phones, and also has Google Chat and Google Messages (SMS/RCS). The other services are the same minus IRC.
Right now, they support iMessage (only on macOS), SMS (with iMessage), WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, IRC (IRC is really interesting!), Slack and Discord DMs. Texts app runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. Texts for iOS is under development and Android is on the roadmap.
I’m not sure how they’re doing Signal and WhatsApp still with the E2EE intact. They mention an in-house Texts Platform SDK for the integration, but unless they are independently audited, or their code is open, we can only take their word for the full E2EE. Their privacy policy does state, however: “The App also preserves end-to-end encryption of your messages if supported by your Messaging Service”. Maybe WhatsApp and Signal don’t support this? I do think that Beeper was a lot more forthcoming about exactly how they manage each service. They also say your messages don’t touch their servers – that implies everything is in the client app i.e., a 3rd party WhatsApp inside the Texts app. But it also means no iMessage at all then for Android or non-macOS platforms.
Whilst we have no real approved global open messaging standard (no, not SMS as no encryption at all), and whilst the likes of Tim Cook insist on their own walled garden for iMessage (they could have just included Android iMessage apps) we’re going to have lots of disconnected messaging services. So, it is still good to see more options like this appearing, as clearly users do want to integrate their messaging more. The fact is the whole world is just not going to be on one messaging service.
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