42 ms·

Truly unified inbox – BlackBerry got it right and nobody has since

286 points by nvr219 6y ago

yunyu 6y ago
Check out Beeper (not affiliated): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
- Dedime 6y ago
  Made by the founder of Pebble Smartwatch. Beeper is a product founded on top of Matrix, which is a standard for interoperable, decentralized, secure communications. Think email, but E2E encrypted and modern. One of the core features is bridges - the ability to reach out into other communication silos and bring them into Matrix. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction No affiliation, but I'm quite excited about the Matrix ecosystem. Element is a great client already.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Cool!
sp332 6y ago
Windows Phone had this too. You could mix timelines from Facebook and Twitter in one view. Messages from FB and SMS showed up in one list. I don't know how they got the licensing and API access to be able to do that, but it was great. Also they styled everything according to the phone UI, so everything was one font, dark mode was just one toggle, it always matched your phone theme, etc.
- drannex 6y ago
  No issue with licensing, all of those services had extremely lax and open APIs, it wasn't until the last few years that they started shutting down nearly all access. There was a huge push for open APIs for over a decade and then they started taking it away under the guise of 'user safety' when really it was due to 'can't make more money' with it.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    It's been almost a year since Twitter decided you had to have a browser capable of running some disturbingly bloated JS app just to view what is essentially a series of short text messages with the occasional image or video. I don't use Twitter but I'm linked there occasionally, and the insanity of that realisation still remains a clear example of what the industry has become.
    - SllX 6y ago
      Remember the good old days when “works with SMS” was a design constraint?
    - addicted 6y ago
      I might be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure there was a short time when “Twitter Client” was to iOS dev tutorials what ToDo apps were to JS framework tutorials.
      - herbst 6y ago
        This was absolutely common. The simplicity and openness of the twitter api was one of the main things that draw me into programming. These days i dont even can have an account as they do not accept my phone number as valid...
    - HWR_14 6y ago
      > It's been almost a year since Twitter decided you had to have a browser capable of running some disturbingly bloated JS app It was mid-December of last year. So almost 6 months.
    - twobitshifter 6y ago
      Crazy that’s what’s become of a tweet that started as an sms. The sms service appears dead too. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/27/21238131/twitter-sms-notifications-disabled-jack-dorsey-hack https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/27/21238131/twitter-sms-noti...
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Honestly I'm shocked that nobody has embraced this. Google obviously wants to do the Unix "lots of small tools" app composability thing, but that depends on having a strong shell. The contact list should be a shell. Let me click a contact and see all my texts, hangouts, calls, etc. in one unified log, and initiate whatever communication protocol be it video-chat or chess from there.
- teamonkey 6y ago
  WP also did things well the other way - being able to separate work and personal life - in a way that is not possible in iOS or Android, even in Microsoft's own apps. You could use Outlook for both work and home, create a different icons for each, and merge multiple personal or work accounts together. You could pause notifications based on calendars, or on certain days, or quickly pause them for several days. On the other hand, Teams on Android just won't shut up, and the longest you can make notifications snooze for is 2 hours. You have to block them entirely to get peace.
  - w0m 6y ago
    >You could use Outlook for both work and home, create a different icons for each, and merge multiple personal or work accounts together. You could pause notifications based on calendars, or on certain days, or quickly pause them for several days. Work Profiles added this behavior to Android recently also; with a quick toggle to disable Work Access completely. (Outlook, Teams, etc all sandboxed and separate from host-applications; seperate marked icons/etc)
  - 29083011397778 6y ago
    The longest you can make notifications snooze by default is 2 hours. It is, of course, possible to change it. It also doesn't require root access, just ADB :) https://www.xda-developers.com/customize-notification-snooze-duration-android-oreo/ https://www.xda-developers.com/customize-notification-snooze...
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  I loved using Nokia Lumia phones, right until Microsoft bought the brand and immediately gave up. Now that was minimalist design done right.
- Diesel555 6y ago
  This was my favorite feature of Windows phone. I thought it was innovative and was the first thing I thought about when I saw this article. On windows phone a person was a person. When you clicked on them you got information from every service tied to them. It was pretty cool.
icy 6y ago
I suppose it's in a way replaced by the notifications shade -- aggregates all messages. Let's be honest, most if not all notifs are from communication apps.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  I do wish notifications were stored for all of time, searchable, and viewable from any device.
  - yourad_io 6y ago
    If you are on Android there are several apps that allow you to view your notification history like Unnotification[1] You can search as well but it doesn't sync, so the "viewable from any device" bit is not possible. It also deletes notifications older than 3 days by default, though you can configure this. I still find it very useful occasionally when I dismiss a message notification and then forget which app it was from. [1] https://unnotification.en.uptodown.com/android https://unnotification.en.uptodown.com/android
- nvr219 6y ago
  Thank you!
protomyth 6y ago
Doesn't the TOS for Twitter prevent this? It's all because each of these services want to present their own "experience". A unifying UI would screw their vision and light hose their revenue.
- major505 6y ago
  I now that twitter limits the number of poeple that can use your client, but I don't know if this applies to notifications.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    Thinking this https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-requirements https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-req...
- RachelF 6y ago
  Yes, each separate service wants to show you ads, hence each service has its own app.
- anoncake 6y ago
  Apple and Google could require apps to make their data available to a unified UI. But that would merely improve user experience, not profits.
  - hnbad 6y ago
    It would probably actually reduce profits, as apps like Twitter make their money by showing you ads. Even if the ads were part of the data stream, because they'd have to be labelled as such, they'd be trivial to filter out.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      I was talking about Google's and Apple's profits.
major505 6y ago
I was talking about this with a friend of mine, that I missed blackberry unified feed. They where great phones, but the slow change to embrace touch killed them.
diamond_hands 6y ago
I think you want https://texts.com/ https://texts.com/ (not affiliated)
tacostakohashi 6y ago
Google (Fi) had a little bit of this happening with SMS + Chat + voicemails all in "Hangouts". Just recently, the've destroyed it and now SMS / voicemails are in "Messages", disconnected from chats.
- xnx 6y ago
  One of the things I miss most about Google Talk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk) was that messages would show up your GMail inbox.
- jetrink 6y ago
  And don't forget that all of that worked within Gmail. It floors me that Google didn't realize what they had when they had it. I used to manage all of my daily communications though one pinned tab that was always open. Heck, half the day, that tab would have its own dedicated computer monitor. Moving to a new service for email, messaging or SMS didn't even enter my mind because it would have been so inconvenient. But now, I'm happy to experiment, because it's all siloed anyway. As someone who has had Gmail since 2004 and a Google phone number since just after they bought Grand Central, there's a good chance I'll be using my own domain for email in a year.
  - user3939382 6y ago
    I am with you. I had voicemail, SMS, "gchat" and email in one place. It was perfect. They pushed so hard for Orkut and especially Google+ when they had this magical combination that they never even marketed, you'd have to have stubmled on the configuration by accident. The entire time I was enjoying it I would explain it to the surprise of others. It was also really nice when there was an iOS app named Talkatone that combined Google Voice calls, SMS, and voicemail into one. Circa 2012 that stopped working and Google rolled out separate Hangouts and Google Voice apps and nothing has been as good since. In the meantime I became sickened by Google's ethics and behavior and have migrated all of those services to a combination of Fastmail and Anveo.
  - tacostakohashi 6y ago
627467 6y ago
This is the main reason why I've enjoyed using BB passport in the past year or so
senectus1 6y ago
The Android version of this was complete shit. The number of times the database would corrupt and you'd have to completely remove all accounts and re-add them. This is my experiance having to support about 20 of the things over 3 or more years.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  That's because it was built around the Android notifications system that simply wasn't designed for such a use case. The BB10 notifications Hub was fantastic.
- itsmenow 6y ago
  That has never happened to me and I've been using the android version for years. I will agree that the Blackberry Hub version for android is indeed not as good as the original Blackberry version (on BB10), but i still prefer it over the alternatives. In fact I still pay them $1/month as it's subscription based...
dleslie 6y ago
I still use the Key2LE because of this feature, and the keyboard.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  You can download the BlackBerry apps on any Android device[1]. But the Android version of the Hub is gimped because there are no apps that were designed to work with it, not like they were on BB10. I still use the BlackBerry keyboard app on my Samsung Galaxy S10e because it's overlayed suggestions UI is so much better than any other keyboard (even though the keyboard has a few bugs, like where it inserts an extra space after closing brackets or quotation marks). I used a KeyOne until mid-2019, but it was falling apart, the camera sucked, and the battery wouldn't keep a charge anymore. But I still miss the physical keyboard. [1] https://cobalt232.github.io/blackberrymanager/ https://cobalt232.github.io/blackberrymanager/
xnx 6y ago
Many startups (e.g. Slack) aim to replace email, but this is backward. Email is open, standardized, and has been around for decades. The main challenge of the current information environment is multiple independent queues of items that ask for our attention: email, texts, chats, app alerts, social messages, social feeds. This would be much easier to manage in a single location, and email is the location where users have the most control. The control the user has with email is exactly the reason so many companies are trying to replace it.
- surround 6y ago
  The thing I hate the most about email is that they allow loading images as a third party resource, instead of requiring them to be sent with the rest of the message data. This allows companies and spammers to track when you open an email. (They also track every link you click on, but that's a separate issue.)
  - sethammons 6y ago
    Images can be base64 encoded into emails
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      They can be, but they aren't required to be. An email that contains all the resources to display itself doesn't leak user information. An email that contains a 1x1 tracking pixel, loaded when the receiver opens the email, lets the sender know that it has been received. In view of email spam, this is an unacceptable breach of privacy.
      - jjav 6y ago
        Configure your client to never load any external links unless you specifically select one for viewing.
  - pantalaimon 6y ago
    That's why some clients won't load images by default, only by request
mraza007 6y ago
This is one the reasons I miss owning a BlackBerry. I even tried to own a blackberry classic Q20. I even ordered myself a blackberry in 2019 from ebay but later found out my carrier didn't support the voice calling anymore. Anyways I loved using blackberry less distractions and loved that unified inbox feature and physical keyboard definitely made it look cool. I heard there are governments around the world still using Blackberrys
xnx 6y ago
This is also one of the reasons it's a shame that the Google Buzz launch went so poorly. Buzz had the chance to be a social network that worked from your inbox.
steviedotboston 6y ago
I bought a Blackberry Classic back around 2015-2016. I only used it for a couple of months, but I really liked the unified inbox. Switching back to Android (and later iOS) felt like I was giving up a great feature
est 6y ago
I think we need a unified voice interface for inboxes and actions. Like how to voice command to press series of button deep inside multiple views and enter something then press save.
SMAAART 6y ago
There used to be a web app, I can't remember the name, but then it was acqui-hired by Facebook.
sly010 6y ago
Arguably your phones notification feature is the unified feed. Theoretically it is possible (on Android) to write a custom home app to display those notifications without dismissing them.
- boredishBoi 6y ago
  There’s a launcher called T-UI I used to use when I had an android. One of the features it allowed was this. It would display a log of all your notification on your Home Screen and you could just click it and go straight into the conversation as if you’d clicked the actual notification. And u could always scroll up and view older notifications because they weren’t dismissed.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Sounds like a potential privacy & security risk, especially if the app can send messages too.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    What is it gonna do, expose your Facebook data to untrustworthy corporations?
  - dvdkon 6y ago
    Yes, and that's why apps on Android need to explicitly ask for permission first. Giving the app that permission is a declaration of trust by the user. Not letting people do that would be a disaster for user agency in my opinion. GDPR and similar laws also mandate clear user consent.
quasineutral 6y ago
Isn't this what Blloc Ratio is trying to acheive? (not affiliated) https://www.blloc.com/ https://www.blloc.com/
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Wow, this looks incredible. Has anyone done an analysis of its security/data privacy issues you might expose yourself to by using this? I'm very skeptical of something that is basically reading data from every app I have. I'd worry that this provides a single weak point that can be compromised (obviously a bad update could just scrape all your data, but also presumably it'd open up more surface area to vulnerabilities?) If it is secure enough to trust with my personal data, that'd be a wonderful solution to my current jumble of apps!
  - kseistrup 6y ago
    At the bottom of the front page: > No cloud processing, no 3rd party services, no compromises. Ratio computes everything on your phone.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      That's basically a pinky-swear guarantee of privacy. Unless it's auditable, we only have their word to go by.
  - vbsteven 6y ago
    I have bought a device from them (Z18 which comes with their own Android flavor and the ratio launcher) and my personal experience wasn't very good: updaters that don't work, their community support board that is not very active, I had to download and flash a ROM from a dubious website using some obscure Mediatek tool just to get a recent version up and running. It was a bad purchase and it doesn't inspire much confidence about their other products. I have spent several days over the last year or so to try and get an alternative open source Android distribution on it but no success yet. I wish I could install LineageOS on it so I can at least have a functional device.
- 6y ago
typon 6y ago
Isn't the reason this can't/doesn't exist because everyone wants you in their own walled garden?
- jaimex2 6y ago
  Bingo
- ddingus 6y ago
  Winner winner, chicken dinner!
- swiley 6y ago
  This is why I no longer use "apps." Most of them are more concerned about "growth" than utility.
- Sakos 6y ago
  Unfortunately, yes. There used to be a time when Pidgin could be my client for everything. I could configure everything the way I wanted it to be, I could find everything in one place and I could rely on my own environment to ensure that messages could be automatically archived long-term. It was a utopia compared to what we have now.
qalmakka 6y ago
I think something like that is not feasible anymore due to how complicated messaging apps have become in the last decade. Unifying several protocols under a same app means either implementing all the shades of how a feature is done in every chat app, or flattening everything to get a sense of uniformity. In the '00s I most IM (that's what it was called back then) basically boiled down to text with a bit of images and files thrown here and there. Nowadays you can basically do a billion things in every single chat app. Given how much pressure has been put on platforms to differentiate, I do not expect any unified message app to succeed any time soon.
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  Not to mention: Why would you want all that shit in one application? IMs are different from E-mails.
- jaimex2 6y ago
  It's totally feasible just against the terms of use of each platform. Trillian used to cover this problem in the early days as well.
  - Gualdrapo 6y ago
    And Pidgin, on desktop. And many other multi protocol 'apps'. The ridiculousness of that "my app has to have its own experience" largely affected desktop. Messaging applications fully integtated with desktop environments are no more, at least what they used to be. It's sad to see how not many people can use Pidgin now, or how things like Telepathy died.
- krageon 6y ago
  > how complicated messaging apps have become Messaging apps have been as simple as they've always been. They're just user-hostile, because we're all okay with that. The "it's so complicated though" line is something that big corporations like to use to pretend as if what everyone wants would be onerous to provide for them. It would not, they just don't want to.
technofiend 6y ago
Google really missed out by not buying blackberry and making their apps an Android exclusive.
- nichos 6y ago
  They probably would have abandoned it within a few months anyway.
gfaure 6y ago
Why not? It's likely because the platforms were all much simpler then. Vendor-specific features like stickers, end-to-end encryption, video attachments, reactions make it difficult to support a subset which is going to satisfy regular users.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Maybe do all that the way other great things were done: RFC XXX Reaction RFC XXX media inline as attachment Of course we know why, and it is all about who owns the path to people's attention. I am waiting for SPAM levels to come up and little breakages to begin. Email is a lot like the Post Office. Everyone imagines it is them in front. Sigh.
- unicodepepper 6y ago
  But vendors are already providing a (somewhat) standard way of displaying that content through regular notifications. If I were to build a unified inbox like this, it would look more or less like a persistent view of the notifications panel from Android.
  - mkay581 6y ago
    This is exactly what I was thinking. But notifications panel doesn't work for the use-case where OP wants to just check in on content that may not have been triggered by a notification.
ddingus 6y ago
I love email, had a Blackberry and that thing was just great. Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would. I do not need or want lots of silos. I do want one store, some rules, and for it to operate off line and async. Replacing email will take a lot. There was email before http. I have seen nothing even close to the simple utility, robustness of email, never mind anything that looks to endure like email has. I have almost all email I have ever received. Amazing. And it just works. The better search is, the better it works. There are tons of emails to myself too. I know I can search them and read what past me suspected present me needs to know and that all weaves right in. I wish more things worked as well and like email does. RSS is one of those things, BTW. USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Async, threaded discussion is amazing. Make inline media a little easier, and... yeah. Problem is none of those high utility things are sexy. Maybe there should be a floor that just works well. Maybe we are not all that well served by all these attempts to disrupt and own people through what are important interactions. Big conflict of interest there, if you ask me. It matters now, is lean, mean, near universally used. Ok, so what is there really to disrupt? Not much. And that is why I love email. Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way. Nice enough for me to think long and hard about putting it at any kind of risk.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  Slack exploded on the scene with a refresh of IRC. USENET could come back with a proper refresh.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    I hate Slack. Unlike IRC, it is too much. And it is thick. Many do not though, your point is good. I love email because I rarely have to think about it. Thought is action. Same with IRC.
    - joshspankit 6y ago
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I seem to remember PalmOS/WebOS doing a pretty decent job. My HP Touchpad had a "unified inbox" at least across mail services, although I don't remember if Texts/Tweets/Chats were in it as well.
joshspankit 6y ago
Blackberry had so much right. All they had to do was keep focused on their actual demographic (high-end office workers), allow their other demographic (drug dealers / buyers), and let everyone else worry about consumers. Always refine the keyboard, unquestionable notifications, ignore the “single pane of glass” trend, and definitely not even a single phone with Android. Their user-base would be “small”, but so what. Noone needs 8 Billion users. 100M is plenty to sustain R&D.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  I never had a Blackberry but everyone I know who did says it was the best phone they ever had.
  - qsi 6y ago
    I loved my Blackberries, and hung on to the last one as long as possible. I think I had to give it up around 2012... but even within the Blackberries, there were differences. Some keyboards were better than other, or at least, suited me better. Having said that, I am not sure they could have withstood the app revolution without participating in. I do think they made major mistakes in their strategy at critical points, but simply focusing on their core business demographic might not have been enough. The get corporate IT on board, IIRC, you had to run a Blackberry Enterprise Server (?) for security and corporate connectedness. This was not cheap. That was becoming increasingly problematic as the iPhone and Android infrastructures caught up security-wise. In the end the cost to maintain the Blackberry servers was no longer justifiable as many people wanted the shiny new phones with all the apps.
    - joshspankit 6y ago
      I agree with much of this, but consider this: If they had “weathered the storm” and kept on course while people were fascinated by the iPhone, by the time the fad faded a bit they would have had the best keyboard, the longest battery life, solid security, and corporations with unquestionable trust in the delivery of messages to employees. You’re right about the BES requirement but they could have easily gone SAAS-optional when the industry shifted to the cloud.
ROARosen 6y ago
> There’s literally nothing like that today, 15+ years later. For those seeking a comparative app for todays platforms, here are some that were mentioned on HN. https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn
- grncdr 6y ago
  +1 for Missive. We've recently started using it at my work and it's been great.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Thank you!!
whoisjuan 6y ago
The answer to why this never happened again is simple. We live in an era where all tech companies or tech services, big or small, are antagonistic against each other. Companies want your full attention and wallet. They don’t want to share you. Monopolistic behavior seems to be a principle of modern tech. You either win everything or lose everything.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  Monopolistic behavior seems to be a principle of the modern economy.
jollybean 6y ago
For pure email, nothing beats 2008 BlackBerry even today. Speed, reliability, consistency, even battery life. It's a complicated history but the wilful ignorance by a lot of industry people and even fairly intelligent consumers was amazing to watch back in the day. The iPhone is of course an amazing product, but the amount of distortion it wields is still unnerving
wenbin 6y ago
A perfect phone for me: A not-so-smart phone with a physical keyboard + simple messaging features (e.g., plain text email, sms) + simple reading features (e.g., readable mode web pages, rss reader).
yantrams 6y ago
Meego(Nokia N9) had this too where you could access all your emails and social notifications in one place with a quick swipe.
- rzr 6y ago
  It has centralized accounts management, but I dont remember that emails and IM was the same app. But you could use any protocol from the messaging app (xmpp, sms etc)...
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Loved my BlackBerry passport, perfect form factor. Very bad phone reception sadly and never happy with the android apps.
normaler 6y ago
My current setup is coming close. I host a public Matrix instance that offers bridges to signal, Telegramm, whatsapp and instagram. This in Addition to tge Matrix native contacts, results in a single ui wäre all my messages arrive. I could als bridge E-Mail, but the combined inbox of k9 mail works good enough. Bonus that this works independant oft my phone. I still miss my blackberry Bild from a Hardware perspective.
mnd999 6y ago
Nokia had something pretty similar on Maemo / Meego IIRC. It’s still such a shame they never properly pushed it. Elop was a moron.
- throwdbaaway 6y ago
  How could they push it when: 1. WhatsApp didn't want to make an official port for Maemo / Meego, for whatever reason. 2. WhatsApp bans your number if it detects that you are using a non-official port. 3. WhatsApp became the essential communication platform. The unified messaging on N900 was great, but without WhatsApp, I was that weird guy who was still stuck with SMS. Jolla, with its android app support, fixes that problem for me. Blame Acton, not Elop.
dddw 6y ago
There is still an android version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
stack_framer 6y ago
You lost me at "Blackberry got it right..." I remember being issued a Blackberry at work and thinking what a terrible idea it was (both the corporate decision and the device). We were doing a software integration with Blackberry servers, and testing that integration was the only reason any of us actually used our newly issued phones. When the iPhone came out two years later, we recognized true innovation and never looked back.
- jamaicahest 6y ago
  You completely ignored the point of the article, which is that Blackberry created a unified inbox and no app has since been able to do that. Even on iPhone.
  - stack_framer 6y ago
    We had 80 employees, and very few of us liked anything about our Blackberries—including the unified inbox. How is that ignoring the point of the article?
    - slothtrop 6y ago
      Because it doesn't contradict it. It's a red herring.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Thanks for the comment. I had to manage BES for years, I know what a mess that is. I'm saying this one feature they had was amazing + never replicated.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Palm’s webOS did a unified inbox the best way. BlackBerry had a few implementations in the 2000s but the one this article refers to wasn’t really a true unified inbox, in part because the applet support for many of the services was weak (you had to go through weird protocols to send IM messages through BIS/BES whatever). The latter implementations with BlackBerry 10 were OK, but this was something Palm really nailed.
- joe_fishfish 6y ago
  Still miss my old Palm Pre 2 for exactly this reason.
- yardie 6y ago
  Had to scroll through almost 100 replies before seeing any mention of WebOS and it’s awesome unified mailbox. For the few fortunate to use it it was an amazing piece of tech. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to push WebOS into the mainstream. Palm was bought by HP who didn’t have much imagination and eventually sold WebOS and the IP for peanuts.
kureikain 6y ago
I haven't used a BlackBerry but I think the reason that's possible is because BlackBerry has some kind of rich notification api where all the app can hook into it? or it's a pull based where the app has a local api where BlackBerry OS can pull the messge via local app and show in there. Either way, I think to achieve this, we need an open platform. I'm not saying open source, but I think we have to have an easy way to access to our data. Can I curl gmail to get my email. nope. Can I curl facebook to get my message. nope. I like Telegram because I can literally just curl it to fetch my message. I think about this a lot and apparently go and build my own email platform[1] which you can literally just do this: curl https://api.hanami.run/v1/mails https://api.hanami.run/v1/mails and get a nice JSON mail. Once all the platform has an easy API like that, I imagined we will see many 3rd client to create a unification UI for all kind of content. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ is a client that unify slack+discord. We're far from perfect but I think first steps for anyone building a chat service or an email platform is to have a very easy and user-friendly API to access their own data. Similarly the https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ protocol is very promising and if enopugh people adopt that protocol we may have that dream come true, as long as anything speak that protocol, we can hook it up to our chat app. --- https://hanami.run https://hanami.run
- nvr219 6y ago
  Thanks!!
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  Looks like you have some good features. I noticed some typos on your landing page, you should run it through a spellchecker. Diposable was the one that stood out to me, but there could be others if that slipped through.
p_l 6y ago
At one point Android attempted to do something similar, though mostly for social media - I do not remember the name of the feature, but it was presented with Android 4.0, but no one seems to have ever implemented it - probably because nothing stopped you from pushing your own walled garden app.
stevage 6y ago
I really don't think I would like this feature. I like the compartmentalisation of different streams of work, different social groups etc. My friends often complain about having different chat apps, but I quite like being able to see a single icon pop up on my lockscreen and having a fair idea who it's from.
joaomoreno 6y ago
Side note: I love the succinct format on this link. Well written and to the point: 1 minute to read. You don't always have to create a blog post with unnecessary information just to post your opinion online. And sometimes a tweet just isn't enough.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Thanks buddy :)
mraza007 6y ago
Anyone still using blackberry how’s your experience has been like?
- slothtrop 6y ago
  Still using my Q10, probably replacing it with a device loaded w/ LineageOS. It's as fast as it was though the battery is starting to get weird (I could just replace that). I never really relied on it for apps, just the tool suite. After they dropped support though, the map navigation and browser experience keeps getting slightly worse. Still, the utility and longevity of it, for myself, is impressive. The Curve 9320 model was another favorite of mine owing to the sheer speed and design, but BB10 is the more comprehensive experience. Got a notification issue as well for a single individual and don't care to reset my device. Will give Android another try. I was curious about switching to a Key2 but would rather have a more de-googled experience.
nottorp 6y ago
Why would you want a unified inbox? That may have been fine when your Blackberry was issued by work and used 99% for work. Now I'm not sure what mixing my work emails/slack with the saturday evening hangout group chat on whatsapp would help with. Tbh not even mixing work emails and slack would help, since we tend to use slack for the present and email more for passing long term goals/reference info.
- 3np 6y ago
  Well, so then maybe you want a couple of unified inboxes - segregated by your personas rather than by service provider Or maybe you don’t. There will never be a one-size-fits-all for these things which is one reason why walled gardens and full vertical integration are horrible.
- dade_ 6y ago
  It's great, instead of dots all over my screen which mean nothing or a disaster of a notification area. For example, BlackBerry Hub has 'views' so you can create a work view and personal, and select whatever you want. Handy, since I want to see WhatsApp for personal and work as some of my coworkers in Asia use it. Not pushing the software, but it was the only thing I could find anymore that didn't require that my email & data get copied into a 3rd party platform (work won't allow it, I don't want it). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
sdeframond 6y ago
I found that I manage a lot of incoming messages directly from the notifications. That is about 80% I would say. For example I delete messages or mark them as read, or I can jump directly to the specific app to write an answer. Does it count as a "unified inbox" of sort? The issue I see is for my parents. They tend to get confused if they have multiple messaging options.
- mvdwoord 6y ago
  Same here, I abuse the notification system as some sort of unified inbox. Probably still dip into the actual apps most of the time.
- nvr219 6y ago
  It's close... But not exactly what I want. For instance, can't multi select and take action on them. Can't sort. And of course once you dismiss (or tap accidentally) it's gone forever.
e12e 6y ago
> Any actual solutions? Tag me on twitter Sigh.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Should I replace with email instead? That's probably a better idea. Fixed.
dade_ 6y ago
BlackBerry Hub is still available and works great. Works with all of my apps, including Slack, Telegram, Teams, WhatsApp: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
- 2ion 6y ago
  Unfortunately it says: contains ads. Same as most if not all BlackBerry Hub apps/components I can find. Seems like it is now freemium garbage and not a product for professionals anymore, unfortunately.
  - mattowen_uk 6y ago
    You still get the 'proper' Hub if you own a Blackberry KeyOne or Key2 phone... ...Both of which are now getting a bit long in the tooth, yet still commanding a lot of money on eBay :(
  - dade_ 6y ago
    There are no ads unless you don't pay after the first 30 days. The subscription is $1/month.
cik 6y ago
Absolutely. At least Blackberry Hub (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...) was useful on Android yes ago, before the various issues. I just want one place for all my communication, and to search up all my communications, across all mediums for an individual. CRM for humans.
ppetty 6y ago
It seems like if Apple created an actual app for Notification Center messages they could do this, or something close enough. The nature of temporary notifications is a pain point for me, and could be solved if I could go to such an app and see previously read notifications. And motivations are already centralized from every app / service.
chadlavi 6y ago
This assumes that those channels are of equal value. Email is a spammy noise hole!
juloo 6y ago
I've used "Disa unified messenger" for years. I've stopped because I've changed which services I use and the app supports only a few. Years later, I still greatly miss it.
ubermonkey 6y ago
Man, I hated the BB "unified inbox" foolishness. HATED IT. I want to see my work mails in one box and my personal ones in another. IMs should be in their own space. (There were lots of other problems with BB in general, too, like the near-total-dependence on a corporate server to do the heavy lifting, at least initially. BBs weren't actually capable of running a true IMAP client until pretty late in the game.)
Gelob 6y ago
Any screenshots of this on a blackberry?
throwaway823882 6y ago
> And I have to ask – why not?! Apple has a stranglehold on their ecosystem just like Blackberry did. They could easily require any new vendor to integrate into their own messaging app, or require apps to use a unified messaging framework which their app could pull from. They could kick out any app that didn't play by their rules. The reasons for not doing this are almost assuredly either legal or business conflicts, or clinging to ideals like the screen wouldn't be as pretty. There is no technical hurdle.
als0 6y ago
Isn't it still available? I've seen this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en_GB&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
robbmorganf 6y ago
Is there anything standing in the way of making such an app? This seems eminently solvable by a motivated app developer.
kevincox 6y ago
Isn't this basically phone notifications? You open the notification drawer and you see all of your messages. There is maybe a slightly different implied ephemerality but at the end of the day they seem basically the same.
IshKebab 6y ago
> Back in like 2004 or 2005 you had a BlackBerry. No I didn't. > There was an “app” on there (they weren’t called apps back then) Yes they were! Anyway I would have thought the reasons why we don't have a unified inbox are pretty obvious. Companies that own the communication systems don't want it and the differences between them are too great to unify.
jedimastert 6y ago
I mean, we do kinda have that now, people just like it a lot less: notifications
rcarmo 6y ago
The Blackberry managed to be a unified inbox because it also unified UX. Today everyone has to have their own UX, so the notion of, say, message _transports_ (which is what you had in, for instance, cross-protocol IM clients like Adium) is dead. iMessage, Facebook, Whatsapp, Signal, etc. all have their own UX, and that is impossible to unify today. Android _almost_ got that right as you could (theoretically) build unified front-ends to front for separate activities back in the early revisions (and I believe PalmOS nearly got there as well) but today every service wants to own the UX to shove their "experience" in your phone...
- joshspankit 6y ago
  "We need to get our brand identity in your face. The ability to message people using our brand is just a necessary evil. Also, the data is lucrative so why not." - If companies were honest
- driminicus 6y ago
  Beeper seems to be doing a pretty decent job with a unified messenger. Though I don't think it does email (yet?)
edem 6y ago
Others got it right too! But they were not looking for what's right for the end user, but what's right for the business ($$$).
ThinkingGuy 6y ago
I remember having a unified inbox, of sorts, in Windows 95. I don't remember the name of Win95's included email app (it was one of the ancestors of Outlook), but it supported plugins for various services, so in addition to my email from my ISP (SMTP/POP3), my inbox also contained Compuserve messages and faxes (not that I ever received many faxes).
wut42 6y ago
There's the Caliopen[1] project who tries to do a sort of unified inbox. [1]: https://www.caliopen.org/ https://www.caliopen.org/
okprod 6y ago
I thought there were apps out there that combined all your incoming communications into one screen but maybe not. I started with the Blackberry 957 through the 8700 and really miss the unified inbox, BBM, BrickBreaker, and the jogwheel on the side.
prionassembly 6y ago
Poultry
rainingmonkey 6y ago
Haiku has a novel take on the email client: all mail is retrieved by the `mail_daemon` and stored as files in a folder. Haiku's filesystem allows arbitrary attributes on files, so you can sort mail by subject, sender, date etc. right there in the file manager. You can construct advanced queries using attributes or body contents, and the query system could even give you a 'unified inbox' folder with any other protocols which stored their messages as files (if they existed).
ochaa 6y ago
Whilst I agree that email is the true universal standard I do not like how many mail providers and clients implement it badly. This then perpetuates issues with how people use it. I’m thinking things like to vs cc, reply all, etc. email etiquette, once gotten right is a great tool that helps both the sender and the receiver, without this email often has a lot of issues that can be frustrating to solve and lead to the rise in other tools (that are in themselves, silos).
elric 6y ago
So many communication silos out there these days. Loads of people use whatsapp and or signal, but those make third party clients impossible (or at least highly impractical). I wish every communications platform with more than N% market penetration was forced to open up to third party clients. I'm sure there are some practical reasons why this is a bad idea, but it would make life a lot easier.

286 points by nvr219 6y ago

Check out Beeper (not affiliated): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278

Dedime 6y ago
Made by the founder of Pebble Smartwatch. Beeper is a product founded on top of Matrix, which is a standard for interoperable, decentralized, secure communications. Think email, but E2E encrypted and modern. One of the core features is bridges - the ability to reach out into other communication silos and bring them into Matrix. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction No affiliation, but I'm quite excited about the Matrix ecosystem. Element is a great client already.
nvr219 6y ago
Cool!

sp332 6y ago

Windows Phone had this too. You could mix timelines from Facebook and Twitter in one view. Messages from FB and SMS showed up in one list. I don't know how they got the licensing and API access to be able to do that, but it was great. Also they styled everything according to the phone UI, so everything was one font, dark mode was just one toggle, it always matched your phone theme, etc.

drannex 6y ago
No issue with licensing, all of those services had extremely lax and open APIs, it wasn't until the last few years that they started shutting down nearly all access. There was a huge push for open APIs for over a decade and then they started taking it away under the guise of 'user safety' when really it was due to 'can't make more money' with it.
- userbinator 6y ago
  It's been almost a year since Twitter decided you had to have a browser capable of running some disturbingly bloated JS app just to view what is essentially a series of short text messages with the occasional image or video. I don't use Twitter but I'm linked there occasionally, and the insanity of that realisation still remains a clear example of what the industry has become.
  - SllX 6y ago
    Remember the good old days when “works with SMS” was a design constraint?
  - addicted 6y ago
    I might be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure there was a short time when “Twitter Client” was to iOS dev tutorials what ToDo apps were to JS framework tutorials.
    - herbst 6y ago
      This was absolutely common. The simplicity and openness of the twitter api was one of the main things that draw me into programming. These days i dont even can have an account as they do not accept my phone number as valid...
  - HWR_14 6y ago
    > It's been almost a year since Twitter decided you had to have a browser capable of running some disturbingly bloated JS app It was mid-December of last year. So almost 6 months.
  - twobitshifter 6y ago
    Crazy that’s what’s become of a tweet that started as an sms. The sms service appears dead too. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/27/21238131/twitter-sms-notifications-disabled-jack-dorsey-hack https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/27/21238131/twitter-sms-noti...
- smnrchrds 6y ago
Pxtl 6y ago
Honestly I'm shocked that nobody has embraced this. Google obviously wants to do the Unix "lots of small tools" app composability thing, but that depends on having a strong shell. The contact list should be a shell. Let me click a contact and see all my texts, hangouts, calls, etc. in one unified log, and initiate whatever communication protocol be it video-chat or chess from there.
teamonkey 6y ago
WP also did things well the other way - being able to separate work and personal life - in a way that is not possible in iOS or Android, even in Microsoft's own apps. You could use Outlook for both work and home, create a different icons for each, and merge multiple personal or work accounts together. You could pause notifications based on calendars, or on certain days, or quickly pause them for several days. On the other hand, Teams on Android just won't shut up, and the longest you can make notifications snooze for is 2 hours. You have to block them entirely to get peace.
- w0m 6y ago
  >You could use Outlook for both work and home, create a different icons for each, and merge multiple personal or work accounts together. You could pause notifications based on calendars, or on certain days, or quickly pause them for several days. Work Profiles added this behavior to Android recently also; with a quick toggle to disable Work Access completely. (Outlook, Teams, etc all sandboxed and separate from host-applications; seperate marked icons/etc)
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  The longest you can make notifications snooze by default is 2 hours. It is, of course, possible to change it. It also doesn't require root access, just ADB :) https://www.xda-developers.com/customize-notification-snooze-duration-android-oreo/ https://www.xda-developers.com/customize-notification-snooze...
emptyparadise 6y ago
I loved using Nokia Lumia phones, right until Microsoft bought the brand and immediately gave up. Now that was minimalist design done right.
Diesel555 6y ago
This was my favorite feature of Windows phone. I thought it was innovative and was the first thing I thought about when I saw this article. On windows phone a person was a person. When you clicked on them you got information from every service tied to them. It was pretty cool.

icy 6y ago

I suppose it's in a way replaced by the notifications shade -- aggregates all messages. Let's be honest, most if not all notifs are from communication apps.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
I do wish notifications were stored for all of time, searchable, and viewable from any device.
- yourad_io 6y ago
  If you are on Android there are several apps that allow you to view your notification history like Unnotification[1] You can search as well but it doesn't sync, so the "viewable from any device" bit is not possible. It also deletes notifications older than 3 days by default, though you can configure this. I still find it very useful occasionally when I dismiss a message notification and then forget which app it was from. [1] https://unnotification.en.uptodown.com/android https://unnotification.en.uptodown.com/android
nvr219 6y ago
Thank you!

protomyth 6y ago

Doesn't the TOS for Twitter prevent this? It's all because each of these services want to present their own "experience". A unifying UI would screw their vision and light hose their revenue.

major505 6y ago
I now that twitter limits the number of poeple that can use your client, but I don't know if this applies to notifications.
- protomyth 6y ago
  Thinking this https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-requirements https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-req...
RachelF 6y ago
Yes, each separate service wants to show you ads, hence each service has its own app.
anoncake 6y ago
Apple and Google could require apps to make their data available to a unified UI. But that would merely improve user experience, not profits.
- hnbad 6y ago
  It would probably actually reduce profits, as apps like Twitter make their money by showing you ads. Even if the ads were part of the data stream, because they'd have to be labelled as such, they'd be trivial to filter out.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    I was talking about Google's and Apple's profits.

major505 6y ago

I was talking about this with a friend of mine, that I missed blackberry unified feed. They where great phones, but the slow change to embrace touch killed them.

diamond_hands 6y ago

I think you want https://texts.com/ https://texts.com/ (not affiliated)

tacostakohashi 6y ago

Google (Fi) had a little bit of this happening with SMS + Chat + voicemails all in "Hangouts". Just recently, the've destroyed it and now SMS / voicemails are in "Messages", disconnected from chats.

xnx 6y ago
One of the things I miss most about Google Talk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk) was that messages would show up your GMail inbox.
jetrink 6y ago
And don't forget that all of that worked within Gmail. It floors me that Google didn't realize what they had when they had it. I used to manage all of my daily communications though one pinned tab that was always open. Heck, half the day, that tab would have its own dedicated computer monitor. Moving to a new service for email, messaging or SMS didn't even enter my mind because it would have been so inconvenient. But now, I'm happy to experiment, because it's all siloed anyway. As someone who has had Gmail since 2004 and a Google phone number since just after they bought Grand Central, there's a good chance I'll be using my own domain for email in a year.
- user3939382 6y ago
  I am with you. I had voicemail, SMS, "gchat" and email in one place. It was perfect. They pushed so hard for Orkut and especially Google+ when they had this magical combination that they never even marketed, you'd have to have stubmled on the configuration by accident. The entire time I was enjoying it I would explain it to the surprise of others. It was also really nice when there was an iOS app named Talkatone that combined Google Voice calls, SMS, and voicemail into one. Circa 2012 that stopped working and Google rolled out separate Hangouts and Google Voice apps and nothing has been as good since. In the meantime I became sickened by Google's ethics and behavior and have migrated all of those services to a combination of Fastmail and Anveo.
- tacostakohashi 6y ago

627467 6y ago

This is the main reason why I've enjoyed using BB passport in the past year or so

senectus1 6y ago

The Android version of this was complete shit. The number of times the database would corrupt and you'd have to completely remove all accounts and re-add them. This is my experiance having to support about 20 of the things over 3 or more years.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
That's because it was built around the Android notifications system that simply wasn't designed for such a use case. The BB10 notifications Hub was fantastic.
itsmenow 6y ago
That has never happened to me and I've been using the android version for years. I will agree that the Blackberry Hub version for android is indeed not as good as the original Blackberry version (on BB10), but i still prefer it over the alternatives. In fact I still pay them $1/month as it's subscription based...

dleslie 6y ago

I still use the Key2LE because of this feature, and the keyboard.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
You can download the BlackBerry apps on any Android device[1]. But the Android version of the Hub is gimped because there are no apps that were designed to work with it, not like they were on BB10. I still use the BlackBerry keyboard app on my Samsung Galaxy S10e because it's overlayed suggestions UI is so much better than any other keyboard (even though the keyboard has a few bugs, like where it inserts an extra space after closing brackets or quotation marks). I used a KeyOne until mid-2019, but it was falling apart, the camera sucked, and the battery wouldn't keep a charge anymore. But I still miss the physical keyboard. [1] https://cobalt232.github.io/blackberrymanager/ https://cobalt232.github.io/blackberrymanager/

xnx 6y ago

Many startups (e.g. Slack) aim to replace email, but this is backward. Email is open, standardized, and has been around for decades. The main challenge of the current information environment is multiple independent queues of items that ask for our attention: email, texts, chats, app alerts, social messages, social feeds. This would be much easier to manage in a single location, and email is the location where users have the most control. The control the user has with email is exactly the reason so many companies are trying to replace it.

surround 6y ago
The thing I hate the most about email is that they allow loading images as a third party resource, instead of requiring them to be sent with the rest of the message data. This allows companies and spammers to track when you open an email. (They also track every link you click on, but that's a separate issue.)
- sethammons 6y ago
  Images can be base64 encoded into emails
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    They can be, but they aren't required to be. An email that contains all the resources to display itself doesn't leak user information. An email that contains a 1x1 tracking pixel, loaded when the receiver opens the email, lets the sender know that it has been received. In view of email spam, this is an unacceptable breach of privacy.
    - jjav 6y ago
      Configure your client to never load any external links unless you specifically select one for viewing.
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  That's why some clients won't load images by default, only by request

mraza007 6y ago

This is one the reasons I miss owning a BlackBerry. I even tried to own a blackberry classic Q20. I even ordered myself a blackberry in 2019 from ebay but later found out my carrier didn't support the voice calling anymore. Anyways I loved using blackberry less distractions and loved that unified inbox feature and physical keyboard definitely made it look cool. I heard there are governments around the world still using Blackberrys

xnx 6y ago

This is also one of the reasons it's a shame that the Google Buzz launch went so poorly. Buzz had the chance to be a social network that worked from your inbox.

steviedotboston 6y ago

I bought a Blackberry Classic back around 2015-2016. I only used it for a couple of months, but I really liked the unified inbox. Switching back to Android (and later iOS) felt like I was giving up a great feature

est 6y ago

I think we need a unified voice interface for inboxes and actions. Like how to voice command to press series of button deep inside multiple views and enter something then press save.

SMAAART 6y ago

There used to be a web app, I can't remember the name, but then it was acqui-hired by Facebook.

sly010 6y ago

Arguably your phones notification feature is the unified feed. Theoretically it is possible (on Android) to write a custom home app to display those notifications without dismissing them.

boredishBoi 6y ago
There’s a launcher called T-UI I used to use when I had an android. One of the features it allowed was this. It would display a log of all your notification on your Home Screen and you could just click it and go straight into the conversation as if you’d clicked the actual notification. And u could always scroll up and view older notifications because they weren’t dismissed.
mr_toad 6y ago
Sounds like a potential privacy & security risk, especially if the app can send messages too.
- anoncake 6y ago
  What is it gonna do, expose your Facebook data to untrustworthy corporations?
- dvdkon 6y ago
  Yes, and that's why apps on Android need to explicitly ask for permission first. Giving the app that permission is a declaration of trust by the user. Not letting people do that would be a disaster for user agency in my opinion. GDPR and similar laws also mandate clear user consent.

quasineutral 6y ago

Isn't this what Blloc Ratio is trying to acheive? (not affiliated) https://www.blloc.com/ https://www.blloc.com/

owenversteeg 6y ago
Wow, this looks incredible. Has anyone done an analysis of its security/data privacy issues you might expose yourself to by using this? I'm very skeptical of something that is basically reading data from every app I have. I'd worry that this provides a single weak point that can be compromised (obviously a bad update could just scrape all your data, but also presumably it'd open up more surface area to vulnerabilities?) If it is secure enough to trust with my personal data, that'd be a wonderful solution to my current jumble of apps!
- kseistrup 6y ago
  At the bottom of the front page: > No cloud processing, no 3rd party services, no compromises. Ratio computes everything on your phone.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    That's basically a pinky-swear guarantee of privacy. Unless it's auditable, we only have their word to go by.
- vbsteven 6y ago
  I have bought a device from them (Z18 which comes with their own Android flavor and the ratio launcher) and my personal experience wasn't very good: updaters that don't work, their community support board that is not very active, I had to download and flash a ROM from a dubious website using some obscure Mediatek tool just to get a recent version up and running. It was a bad purchase and it doesn't inspire much confidence about their other products. I have spent several days over the last year or so to try and get an alternative open source Android distribution on it but no success yet. I wish I could install LineageOS on it so I can at least have a functional device.
6y ago

typon 6y ago

Isn't the reason this can't/doesn't exist because everyone wants you in their own walled garden?

jaimex2 6y ago
Bingo
ddingus 6y ago
Winner winner, chicken dinner!
swiley 6y ago
This is why I no longer use "apps." Most of them are more concerned about "growth" than utility.
Sakos 6y ago
Unfortunately, yes. There used to be a time when Pidgin could be my client for everything. I could configure everything the way I wanted it to be, I could find everything in one place and I could rely on my own environment to ensure that messages could be automatically archived long-term. It was a utopia compared to what we have now.

qalmakka 6y ago

I think something like that is not feasible anymore due to how complicated messaging apps have become in the last decade. Unifying several protocols under a same app means either implementing all the shades of how a feature is done in every chat app, or flattening everything to get a sense of uniformity. In the '00s I most IM (that's what it was called back then) basically boiled down to text with a bit of images and files thrown here and there. Nowadays you can basically do a billion things in every single chat app. Given how much pressure has been put on platforms to differentiate, I do not expect any unified message app to succeed any time soon.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago
Not to mention: Why would you want all that shit in one application? IMs are different from E-mails.
jaimex2 6y ago
It's totally feasible just against the terms of use of each platform. Trillian used to cover this problem in the early days as well.
- Gualdrapo 6y ago
  And Pidgin, on desktop. And many other multi protocol 'apps'. The ridiculousness of that "my app has to have its own experience" largely affected desktop. Messaging applications fully integtated with desktop environments are no more, at least what they used to be. It's sad to see how not many people can use Pidgin now, or how things like Telepathy died.
krageon 6y ago
> how complicated messaging apps have become Messaging apps have been as simple as they've always been. They're just user-hostile, because we're all okay with that. The "it's so complicated though" line is something that big corporations like to use to pretend as if what everyone wants would be onerous to provide for them. It would not, they just don't want to.

technofiend 6y ago

Google really missed out by not buying blackberry and making their apps an Android exclusive.

nichos 6y ago
They probably would have abandoned it within a few months anyway.

gfaure 6y ago

Why not? It's likely because the platforms were all much simpler then. Vendor-specific features like stickers, end-to-end encryption, video attachments, reactions make it difficult to support a subset which is going to satisfy regular users.

ddingus 6y ago
Maybe do all that the way other great things were done: RFC XXX Reaction RFC XXX media inline as attachment Of course we know why, and it is all about who owns the path to people's attention. I am waiting for SPAM levels to come up and little breakages to begin. Email is a lot like the Post Office. Everyone imagines it is them in front. Sigh.
unicodepepper 6y ago
But vendors are already providing a (somewhat) standard way of displaying that content through regular notifications. If I were to build a unified inbox like this, it would look more or less like a persistent view of the notifications panel from Android.
- mkay581 6y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking. But notifications panel doesn't work for the use-case where OP wants to just check in on content that may not have been triggered by a notification.

ddingus 6y ago

I love email, had a Blackberry and that thing was just great. Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would. I do not need or want lots of silos. I do want one store, some rules, and for it to operate off line and async. Replacing email will take a lot. There was email before http. I have seen nothing even close to the simple utility, robustness of email, never mind anything that looks to endure like email has. I have almost all email I have ever received. Amazing. And it just works. The better search is, the better it works. There are tons of emails to myself too. I know I can search them and read what past me suspected present me needs to know and that all weaves right in. I wish more things worked as well and like email does. RSS is one of those things, BTW. USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Async, threaded discussion is amazing. Make inline media a little easier, and... yeah. Problem is none of those high utility things are sexy. Maybe there should be a floor that just works well. Maybe we are not all that well served by all these attempts to disrupt and own people through what are important interactions. Big conflict of interest there, if you ask me. It matters now, is lean, mean, near universally used. Ok, so what is there really to disrupt? Not much. And that is why I love email. Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way. Nice enough for me to think long and hard about putting it at any kind of risk.

joshspankit 6y ago
Slack exploded on the scene with a refresh of IRC. USENET could come back with a proper refresh.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I hate Slack. Unlike IRC, it is too much. And it is thick. Many do not though, your point is good. I love email because I rarely have to think about it. Thought is action. Same with IRC.
  - joshspankit 6y ago

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I seem to remember PalmOS/WebOS doing a pretty decent job. My HP Touchpad had a "unified inbox" at least across mail services, although I don't remember if Texts/Tweets/Chats were in it as well.

joshspankit 6y ago

Blackberry had so much right. All they had to do was keep focused on their actual demographic (high-end office workers), allow their other demographic (drug dealers / buyers), and let everyone else worry about consumers. Always refine the keyboard, unquestionable notifications, ignore the “single pane of glass” trend, and definitely not even a single phone with Android. Their user-base would be “small”, but so what. Noone needs 8 Billion users. 100M is plenty to sustain R&D.

throwawayboise 6y ago
I never had a Blackberry but everyone I know who did says it was the best phone they ever had.
- qsi 6y ago
  I loved my Blackberries, and hung on to the last one as long as possible. I think I had to give it up around 2012... but even within the Blackberries, there were differences. Some keyboards were better than other, or at least, suited me better. Having said that, I am not sure they could have withstood the app revolution without participating in. I do think they made major mistakes in their strategy at critical points, but simply focusing on their core business demographic might not have been enough. The get corporate IT on board, IIRC, you had to run a Blackberry Enterprise Server (?) for security and corporate connectedness. This was not cheap. That was becoming increasingly problematic as the iPhone and Android infrastructures caught up security-wise. In the end the cost to maintain the Blackberry servers was no longer justifiable as many people wanted the shiny new phones with all the apps.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    I agree with much of this, but consider this: If they had “weathered the storm” and kept on course while people were fascinated by the iPhone, by the time the fad faded a bit they would have had the best keyboard, the longest battery life, solid security, and corporations with unquestionable trust in the delivery of messages to employees. You’re right about the BES requirement but they could have easily gone SAAS-optional when the industry shifted to the cloud.

ROARosen 6y ago

> There’s literally nothing like that today, 15+ years later. For those seeking a comparative app for todays platforms, here are some that were mentioned on HN. https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn

grncdr 6y ago
+1 for Missive. We've recently started using it at my work and it's been great.
nvr219 6y ago
Thank you!!

whoisjuan 6y ago

The answer to why this never happened again is simple. We live in an era where all tech companies or tech services, big or small, are antagonistic against each other. Companies want your full attention and wallet. They don’t want to share you. Monopolistic behavior seems to be a principle of modern tech. You either win everything or lose everything.

KirillPanov 6y ago
Monopolistic behavior seems to be a principle of the modern economy.

jollybean 6y ago

For pure email, nothing beats 2008 BlackBerry even today. Speed, reliability, consistency, even battery life. It's a complicated history but the wilful ignorance by a lot of industry people and even fairly intelligent consumers was amazing to watch back in the day. The iPhone is of course an amazing product, but the amount of distortion it wields is still unnerving

wenbin 6y ago

A perfect phone for me: A not-so-smart phone with a physical keyboard + simple messaging features (e.g., plain text email, sms) + simple reading features (e.g., readable mode web pages, rss reader).

yantrams 6y ago

Meego(Nokia N9) had this too where you could access all your emails and social notifications in one place with a quick swipe.

rzr 6y ago
It has centralized accounts management, but I dont remember that emails and IM was the same app. But you could use any protocol from the messaging app (xmpp, sms etc)...

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Loved my BlackBerry passport, perfect form factor. Very bad phone reception sadly and never happy with the android apps.

normaler 6y ago

My current setup is coming close. I host a public Matrix instance that offers bridges to signal, Telegramm, whatsapp and instagram. This in Addition to tge Matrix native contacts, results in a single ui wäre all my messages arrive. I could als bridge E-Mail, but the combined inbox of k9 mail works good enough. Bonus that this works independant oft my phone. I still miss my blackberry Bild from a Hardware perspective.

mnd999 6y ago

Nokia had something pretty similar on Maemo / Meego IIRC. It’s still such a shame they never properly pushed it. Elop was a moron.

throwdbaaway 6y ago
How could they push it when: 1. WhatsApp didn't want to make an official port for Maemo / Meego, for whatever reason. 2. WhatsApp bans your number if it detects that you are using a non-official port. 3. WhatsApp became the essential communication platform. The unified messaging on N900 was great, but without WhatsApp, I was that weird guy who was still stuck with SMS. Jolla, with its android app support, fixes that problem for me. Blame Acton, not Elop.

dddw 6y ago

There is still an android version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...

stack_framer 6y ago

You lost me at "Blackberry got it right..." I remember being issued a Blackberry at work and thinking what a terrible idea it was (both the corporate decision and the device). We were doing a software integration with Blackberry servers, and testing that integration was the only reason any of us actually used our newly issued phones. When the iPhone came out two years later, we recognized true innovation and never looked back.

jamaicahest 6y ago
You completely ignored the point of the article, which is that Blackberry created a unified inbox and no app has since been able to do that. Even on iPhone.
- stack_framer 6y ago
  We had 80 employees, and very few of us liked anything about our Blackberries—including the unified inbox. How is that ignoring the point of the article?
  - slothtrop 6y ago
    Because it doesn't contradict it. It's a red herring.
nvr219 6y ago
Thanks for the comment. I had to manage BES for years, I know what a mess that is. I'm saying this one feature they had was amazing + never replicated.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

Palm’s webOS did a unified inbox the best way. BlackBerry had a few implementations in the 2000s but the one this article refers to wasn’t really a true unified inbox, in part because the applet support for many of the services was weak (you had to go through weird protocols to send IM messages through BIS/BES whatever). The latter implementations with BlackBerry 10 were OK, but this was something Palm really nailed.

joe_fishfish 6y ago
Still miss my old Palm Pre 2 for exactly this reason.
yardie 6y ago
Had to scroll through almost 100 replies before seeing any mention of WebOS and it’s awesome unified mailbox. For the few fortunate to use it it was an amazing piece of tech. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to push WebOS into the mainstream. Palm was bought by HP who didn’t have much imagination and eventually sold WebOS and the IP for peanuts.

kureikain 6y ago

I haven't used a BlackBerry but I think the reason that's possible is because BlackBerry has some kind of rich notification api where all the app can hook into it? or it's a pull based where the app has a local api where BlackBerry OS can pull the messge via local app and show in there. Either way, I think to achieve this, we need an open platform. I'm not saying open source, but I think we have to have an easy way to access to our data. Can I curl gmail to get my email. nope. Can I curl facebook to get my message. nope. I like Telegram because I can literally just curl it to fetch my message. I think about this a lot and apparently go and build my own email platform[1] which you can literally just do this: curl https://api.hanami.run/v1/mails https://api.hanami.run/v1/mails and get a nice JSON mail. Once all the platform has an easy API like that, I imagined we will see many 3rd client to create a unification UI for all kind of content. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ is a client that unify slack+discord. We're far from perfect but I think first steps for anyone building a chat service or an email platform is to have a very easy and user-friendly API to access their own data. Similarly the https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ protocol is very promising and if enopugh people adopt that protocol we may have that dream come true, as long as anything speak that protocol, we can hook it up to our chat app. --- https://hanami.run https://hanami.run

nvr219 6y ago
Thanks!!
twobitshifter 6y ago
Looks like you have some good features. I noticed some typos on your landing page, you should run it through a spellchecker. Diposable was the one that stood out to me, but there could be others if that slipped through.

p_l 6y ago

At one point Android attempted to do something similar, though mostly for social media - I do not remember the name of the feature, but it was presented with Android 4.0, but no one seems to have ever implemented it - probably because nothing stopped you from pushing your own walled garden app.

stevage 6y ago

I really don't think I would like this feature. I like the compartmentalisation of different streams of work, different social groups etc. My friends often complain about having different chat apps, but I quite like being able to see a single icon pop up on my lockscreen and having a fair idea who it's from.

joaomoreno 6y ago

Side note: I love the succinct format on this link. Well written and to the point: 1 minute to read. You don't always have to create a blog post with unnecessary information just to post your opinion online. And sometimes a tweet just isn't enough.

nvr219 6y ago
Thanks buddy :)

mraza007 6y ago

Anyone still using blackberry how’s your experience has been like?

slothtrop 6y ago
Still using my Q10, probably replacing it with a device loaded w/ LineageOS. It's as fast as it was though the battery is starting to get weird (I could just replace that). I never really relied on it for apps, just the tool suite. After they dropped support though, the map navigation and browser experience keeps getting slightly worse. Still, the utility and longevity of it, for myself, is impressive. The Curve 9320 model was another favorite of mine owing to the sheer speed and design, but BB10 is the more comprehensive experience. Got a notification issue as well for a single individual and don't care to reset my device. Will give Android another try. I was curious about switching to a Key2 but would rather have a more de-googled experience.

nottorp 6y ago

Why would you want a unified inbox? That may have been fine when your Blackberry was issued by work and used 99% for work. Now I'm not sure what mixing my work emails/slack with the saturday evening hangout group chat on whatsapp would help with. Tbh not even mixing work emails and slack would help, since we tend to use slack for the present and email more for passing long term goals/reference info.

3np 6y ago
Well, so then maybe you want a couple of unified inboxes - segregated by your personas rather than by service provider Or maybe you don’t. There will never be a one-size-fits-all for these things which is one reason why walled gardens and full vertical integration are horrible.
dade_ 6y ago
It's great, instead of dots all over my screen which mean nothing or a disaster of a notification area. For example, BlackBerry Hub has 'views' so you can create a work view and personal, and select whatever you want. Handy, since I want to see WhatsApp for personal and work as some of my coworkers in Asia use it. Not pushing the software, but it was the only thing I could find anymore that didn't require that my email & data get copied into a 3rd party platform (work won't allow it, I don't want it). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...

sdeframond 6y ago

I found that I manage a lot of incoming messages directly from the notifications. That is about 80% I would say. For example I delete messages or mark them as read, or I can jump directly to the specific app to write an answer. Does it count as a "unified inbox" of sort? The issue I see is for my parents. They tend to get confused if they have multiple messaging options.

mvdwoord 6y ago
Same here, I abuse the notification system as some sort of unified inbox. Probably still dip into the actual apps most of the time.
nvr219 6y ago
It's close... But not exactly what I want. For instance, can't multi select and take action on them. Can't sort. And of course once you dismiss (or tap accidentally) it's gone forever.

e12e 6y ago

> Any actual solutions? Tag me on twitter Sigh.

nvr219 6y ago
Should I replace with email instead? That's probably a better idea. Fixed.

dade_ 6y ago

BlackBerry Hub is still available and works great. Works with all of my apps, including Slack, Telegram, Teams, WhatsApp: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...

2ion 6y ago
Unfortunately it says: contains ads. Same as most if not all BlackBerry Hub apps/components I can find. Seems like it is now freemium garbage and not a product for professionals anymore, unfortunately.
- mattowen_uk 6y ago
  You still get the 'proper' Hub if you own a Blackberry KeyOne or Key2 phone... ...Both of which are now getting a bit long in the tooth, yet still commanding a lot of money on eBay :(
- dade_ 6y ago
  There are no ads unless you don't pay after the first 30 days. The subscription is $1/month.

cik 6y ago

Absolutely. At least Blackberry Hub (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...) was useful on Android yes ago, before the various issues. I just want one place for all my communication, and to search up all my communications, across all mediums for an individual. CRM for humans.

ppetty 6y ago

It seems like if Apple created an actual app for Notification Center messages they could do this, or something close enough. The nature of temporary notifications is a pain point for me, and could be solved if I could go to such an app and see previously read notifications. And motivations are already centralized from every app / service.

chadlavi 6y ago

This assumes that those channels are of equal value. Email is a spammy noise hole!

juloo 6y ago

I've used "Disa unified messenger" for years. I've stopped because I've changed which services I use and the app supports only a few. Years later, I still greatly miss it.

ubermonkey 6y ago

Man, I hated the BB "unified inbox" foolishness. HATED IT. I want to see my work mails in one box and my personal ones in another. IMs should be in their own space. (There were lots of other problems with BB in general, too, like the near-total-dependence on a corporate server to do the heavy lifting, at least initially. BBs weren't actually capable of running a true IMAP client until pretty late in the game.)

Gelob 6y ago

Any screenshots of this on a blackberry?

throwaway823882 6y ago

> And I have to ask – why not?! Apple has a stranglehold on their ecosystem just like Blackberry did. They could easily require any new vendor to integrate into their own messaging app, or require apps to use a unified messaging framework which their app could pull from. They could kick out any app that didn't play by their rules. The reasons for not doing this are almost assuredly either legal or business conflicts, or clinging to ideals like the screen wouldn't be as pretty. There is no technical hurdle.

als0 6y ago

Isn't it still available? I've seen this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry.hub&hl=en_GB&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...

robbmorganf 6y ago

Is there anything standing in the way of making such an app? This seems eminently solvable by a motivated app developer.

kevincox 6y ago

Isn't this basically phone notifications? You open the notification drawer and you see all of your messages. There is maybe a slightly different implied ephemerality but at the end of the day they seem basically the same.

IshKebab 6y ago

> Back in like 2004 or 2005 you had a BlackBerry. No I didn't. > There was an “app” on there (they weren’t called apps back then) Yes they were! Anyway I would have thought the reasons why we don't have a unified inbox are pretty obvious. Companies that own the communication systems don't want it and the differences between them are too great to unify.

jedimastert 6y ago

I mean, we do kinda have that now, people just like it a lot less: notifications

rcarmo 6y ago

The Blackberry managed to be a unified inbox because it also unified UX. Today everyone has to have their own UX, so the notion of, say, message _transports_ (which is what you had in, for instance, cross-protocol IM clients like Adium) is dead. iMessage, Facebook, Whatsapp, Signal, etc. all have their own UX, and that is impossible to unify today. Android _almost_ got that right as you could (theoretically) build unified front-ends to front for separate activities back in the early revisions (and I believe PalmOS nearly got there as well) but today every service wants to own the UX to shove their "experience" in your phone...

joshspankit 6y ago
"We need to get our brand identity in your face. The ability to message people using our brand is just a necessary evil. Also, the data is lucrative so why not." - If companies were honest
driminicus 6y ago
Beeper seems to be doing a pretty decent job with a unified messenger. Though I don't think it does email (yet?)

edem 6y ago

Others got it right too! But they were not looking for what's right for the end user, but what's right for the business ($$$).

ThinkingGuy 6y ago

I remember having a unified inbox, of sorts, in Windows 95. I don't remember the name of Win95's included email app (it was one of the ancestors of Outlook), but it supported plugins for various services, so in addition to my email from my ISP (SMTP/POP3), my inbox also contained Compuserve messages and faxes (not that I ever received many faxes).

wut42 6y ago

There's the Caliopen[1] project who tries to do a sort of unified inbox. [1]: https://www.caliopen.org/ https://www.caliopen.org/

okprod 6y ago

I thought there were apps out there that combined all your incoming communications into one screen but maybe not. I started with the Blackberry 957 through the 8700 and really miss the unified inbox, BBM, BrickBreaker, and the jogwheel on the side.

prionassembly 6y ago

Poultry

rainingmonkey 6y ago

Haiku has a novel take on the email client: all mail is retrieved by the `mail_daemon` and stored as files in a folder. Haiku's filesystem allows arbitrary attributes on files, so you can sort mail by subject, sender, date etc. right there in the file manager. You can construct advanced queries using attributes or body contents, and the query system could even give you a 'unified inbox' folder with any other protocols which stored their messages as files (if they existed).

ochaa 6y ago

Whilst I agree that email is the true universal standard I do not like how many mail providers and clients implement it badly. This then perpetuates issues with how people use it. I’m thinking things like to vs cc, reply all, etc. email etiquette, once gotten right is a great tool that helps both the sender and the receiver, without this email often has a lot of issues that can be frustrating to solve and lead to the rise in other tools (that are in themselves, silos).

elric 6y ago

So many communication silos out there these days. Loads of people use whatsapp and or signal, but those make third party clients impossible (or at least highly impractical). I wish every communications platform with more than N% market penetration was forced to open up to third party clients. I'm sure there are some practical reasons why this is a bad idea, but it would make life a lot easier.