Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by spiderfarmer 3327 days ago
I have always trouble remembering where a message came in. I have SMS / iMessage, Messenger, Whatsapp, 5 e-mail accounts and a Forum Inbox to worry about. And since you can't exactly flag messages as 'to do' I have to answer immediately or risk forgetting to reply.

I hate that.
2 comments
mholmes680 3327 days ago
Ditto this, on android.

I have Messages, which i think is Google's... and i only downloaded it because the apps from Samsung, Verizon, and Facebook went to war in January (on my phone at least) and somehow I ended up getting texts in either the samsung app or verizon but never both, but group conversations in facebook messenger, but only the verizon app would actually allow picture messages to be viewable if i sent them to my mother.

I also have Allo, because a (<-- not plural) coworker and I were curious about it. I think it solved that they didn't have facebook but did have apple, or maybe not i don't know. I also downloaded Duo and haven't opened it since, and I had hangouts, but i'm so very angry that Google screwed that up yet again. I have zero confidence in Google products fulfilling any of my needs completely ever again, and I really used to be the Google-champion of my friends... sigh.

link
spiderfarmer 3327 days ago
Yeah, Google's been messing up messaging ever since Google Wave.
link
mifeng 3327 days ago
Me too. On my Pixel, messages will randomly appear either in:

* Allo

* Hangouts

* Messenger (Android)

* Messenger (Facebook)

* WhatsApp

It's like SMS-Roulette.

link
visarga 3327 days ago
A possible solution would be to run all third party apps in containers and use computer vision (deep learning) to collect messages and notifications from their screens into a single place, if they don't want to cooperate officially. I don't know the legal implications though.

Another app that should run into a container and be post-processed by computer vision is the web browser. We need to contain the browser itself (more privacy) and keep the pesky ads out of our eyes in a way that is impossible to hack by clever scripting or ad-block detection. On the next round, ad publishers would have to create adversarial ads that fool the classifier which would be a whole lot more difficult.

link
wcummings 3327 days ago
I just tell everyone to email me. I have one email address. Everyone uses email. Problem solved.
link