Text messaging is a nuisance

I came across this new service called texts.com over the weekend that looks promising. If it does what it says, I may not have to hate text messaging anymore.

Text Messaging is really a nuisance. I don’t mean the people sending the messages, I mean the actual messaging apps. Stupid notifications that pop up irrespective of what you’re doing. No way to star messages or mark them for a response later, which feeds that underlying demand for an immediate response lest you read the message now and forget to respond altogether.

Text messaging apps literally want all of your attention and they want it right now.

Hopefully, this new service texts.com can help. They’re building an all-in-one inbox for various messaging apps (text messaging, iMessage, Signal, etc.), and also including features that I’ve been wanting for a long time in a messaging app.

I’ve always thought it’s crazy that there hasn’t been a way to mark a message as “Unread” or “Reply Later”. Who knows how many messages I’ve forgotten to reply to over the years because I’ll read a message and then don’t remember to get back to it… 🤦‍♂️.

I also love the fact that their 2nd listed feature is…

“Privacy first.”
“Messages never touch our servers. They’re sent directly to the platforms preserving end-to-end encryption. We make money by charging you a monthly subscription.”

Awesome.

Features include the ability to Archive, Snooze, and Mark messages as unread. Although, I think they need to directly address the Reply later situation and add in a “Reply Later” button. They’re probably just including the more common email-type functionality but I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want to respond to messages as soon as they come in so I think a dedicated Reply Later button would get a lot of use.

I use a service called HEY Email for my personal and work email and I like how they implemented their Reply Later feature. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternative, which is the hacky-type solution of marking a message as Unread (or Starring it). The problem with marking a message as unread in that situation is that the message is not unread like you’re marking it, because you literally just read it. What you’re really wanting to do is flag the message in a way that you’ll know and remember that you need to reply to it later. So a dedicated Reply Later button seems to make a lot of sense.

Anyway, I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet because it’s in an invite-only beta, but I signed up for an invite so I’m looking forward to when that comes. Let’s hope it can solve my text messaging woes and I’ll gladly kick my current needy messaging apps to the curbs.