[huangc10]

Nice read. This is something we wanted to solve for our mobile applications too but we don't get enough traffic (per article, you guys are ~100k msgs/hr) to justify the engineering time required for this.

I don't use Airbnb as often as I should but I'm wondering do you guys have data on the users who simply use text messaging on the mobile devices (or other instant messengers?).

What led to the decision to spend time optimizing mobile messaging within the Airbnb app than just finding an easier path to connect users through text messaging?

[bfred_it]

Text messaging? No thanks. I need free international communication from my computer, not paid clunky international messaging only from my phone.

Plus they want to censor and control the conversation; private texting is not happening.

[krashidov]

What did you end up using ? Have you heard of Layer?

[huangc10]

Thanks for the tip, and I'll be sure to mention Layer as a solution if/when we tackle this problem in the future. I just checked their site and it looks very promising.

After trying to find a solution earlier this year with my product manager, we decided to just stick to what we had (which was simply manual refresh in the messaging view by the user), due to engineering time/cost.

Since messaging is not a top priority in the app, we agreed to come back to the problem in the future. However, it is absolutely something I would like to solve given the chance. However, at the end of the day, this kind of messaging solution requires the work of backend engineers which will take up development time.