The future of instant messaging
Please leave me alone :) I mean...
I'm not 40 yet, but let's talk about the good old days... You know when you were receiving sms from friends, and they were not stacked between bank verification codes, notifications of pending or delayed deliveries, brand sales you don't care about... Should we talk about WhatsApp? You know that instant messaging app that works really well in all circumstances, so well that people create groups for literally anything: dinner organization, a weekend with friends, a wedding... It works so well that in addition to the family groups, you have all your office colleagues, but also your customers, your suppliers, your vacation rental owner... The funny thing is that you couldn't even sort conversations by unread until recently, which doesn't prevent you from always having 40 conversations with that little blue dot. So you thought you'd use Telegram? Well yes, Telegram is full of features, it's a bit like the Disneyland of messaging, except that every time a contact installs the application (and even if this person was already using it, apparently, I am just so lost with that noisy feature...) you get a notification in the app, even if you didn't ask for it. Anyway, noise, noise, noise. What about Snap?! It's fun and creative, so ok you don't have a history beyond 24 hours (but you can save messages, quite smart actually) and by accident after a late party, you may receive the face of a friend on a cat body who repeats a lot of bullshit with a voice of Alvin and the Chipmunks... So what's the worst?
The worst thing is to keep suffering from all the notifications, or worst to lose track of the people who count for you before the others. Of course, there is a radical, collective, even sublime solution, the one of creating and applying an instant messaging manifesto, but since it's already hard to do anything when it's a condominium with ten neighbors, I don't see how we'd organize it. More seriously, I have two solutions for you :)
The first is to stop being a victim.
The most radical solution is to bookmark the people close to you, activate the "do not disturb" mode, and you’re set. You might miss some important things, but you'll see the world doesn't stop spinning, especially when you're focused, it actually spins faster (well, don't kid yourself too much...)
A less radical solution is to mute all the groups. If you want to go further, you only activate the dots on WhatsApp (just a little red dot gets displayed) and deactivate the notification banners. And if you need an emergency channel for some people, you put them on Telegram, you'll see that it's not where people come to create conversations unexpectedly.
The second solution is Roze, a kind of Snap but for grown-ups.
The thing that Snap has done very well (Instagram and Facebook as well but as a side product) is that you can only chat with your friends!
What if messaging was like home, a private, intimate space where only invited people could enter... A space over which you would regain control. How many people are we talking about? In my case, 10 people from my close professional circle, 15 from my family circle, 20 friends, and another 10 random people, about 50 total, but it could very well be 100. Simply, all these people agreed to connect. And they're not mixed up with many other people who simply show up unannounced...
Roze is not just a messaging app that Mathias, Ben, and their team have coded on the fly during evenings and weekends, it's...
A messaging system with your privacy at its core:
Encrypted end-to-end, it means that your messages, photos, and audios are only visible to you and the recipient. It is neither stored nor readable on the servers of the app.
No one can show up and chat with you unless you have accepted their contact request.
Your phone number or nickname cannot be seen in groups unless enabled in the settings.
History can be changed, screenshots notified, and deleted messages are removed on all devices involved.
You can send one-time messages, pictures, or audio by long-pressing the send button.
By default the notifications are silent, meaning that you will receive notifications, but without vibration or sound, if needed, you can put a contact in your favorite for a few hours or forever to be notified systematically when they send you a message.
Roze is a complete messaging app:
You can quickly access the camera and microphone from the home screen to quickly send a message to someone or several people at once.
If you long press on a conversation or a message, you have lots of options, including the ability to edit a message.
Because a person can be a friend to you but a colleague, or a spouse to another, you can customize their name and profile picture.
With the "streak" function, you can see on the profile of a conversation how many messages you have sent to a person and over how many days.
You can enable or disable the weather, time zone, and obviously the read receipt function.
You can mute, unread, archive, or reschedule conversations with the Snooze function.
If you double-tap on a message, you can reply to it, and if you reply with emojis, they will be displayed in reaction to the message.
When a contact is in the room at the same time as you, you’ll feel a heartbeat.
Also... On iOS 16 you can put four of your favorite contacts on your screen saver to access them in a tap.
The application is only available on TestFlight for the moment. I invite you to only share the link with close people. The idea is that once you have 3 or 4 regular people using the app, it becomes an everyday joy and you just want to convert more and more people you are really close to.
It's only available on iOS, both on iPhone and Mac (the desktop app is not as stable as a billionaire's yacht, but it does the job). So obviously there are a lot of things in the pipeline to improve the speed of the camera, to share files, to better manage media and a lot of little things, but since I finally use Roze on a daily basis with my friends and family, I thought it was about time to talk about it around me :)
Mathias, Ben, Ivan, Thibaud, and Alexis, keep up the good work ! :)
Some pictures below while you start downloading it on http://roze.im
And some power moves right here…
