The “dignity” part applies less to Apple’s Messages, and more to using ad-funded software where you are the product being “monetized” and manipulated. I find that repulsive and degrading.
Messages and Tact come from the same place in that both aim to just enable people to communicate, without any further sinister or degrading motive.
Thank you, good observations. Yes, we have designed and built the system in a way that can be sustainable with a reasonably small investment or number of paying users. It’s very intentional to not have pressure for quick growth and “monetizing”, and we can take a bit of time to figure it out.
I agree with your “note-taking or collaborative” sentiment. We aim to provide a different experience from many other chat apps. More… calm? Professional? Boring? Serious? Respectful? We haven’t quite figured out the adjectives, but yes, it is intentional.
Thank you for the idea. We haven’t yet built “share a link to directly join a group” but it fits well with the vision and we’ll do it, just didn’t make the initial public beta scope.
At the end of the day, it goes back to a very simple question - what is the basic business model, and how does money move? Who is paying for what, and what are the true incentives?
I believe that Apple’s true incentive is to sell their own devices and services to users and businesses, and let developers like Tact participate in the app economy to possibly get a small piece of that.
Google is an ad company. This is why I am as suspicious of Android as many people here are of Apple. What business is Google in, at the end of the day? Who is the product, and who is the customer?
I mentioned desktop because when we operate in the Apple universe, the devices and software all come from the same place, with the same philosophy, for better or worse. When you use e.g a Windows desktop and an Android device, now you suddenly have two separate universes, philosophies and privacy attitudes to figure out. I think Microsoft is doing a great job. They are not in the business of actively abusing you as ad-driven businesses are but their main focus is enterprise and platforms these days because that’s where the money is.
Note also that we don’t provide a way to discover other users. This means that you can only connect with people with whom you already have a connection through some other real-life or online channel.
This is also my answer to the validation of peers - it must happen out of band, outside of Tact. We currently don’t provide any answer to it in the product.
Yes. We fully embrace the iCloud/CloudKit security model. All chats live in the private database of the owner, and are shared with others through the iCloud sharing facilities and the shared database. And yes, while it all goes back to iCloud share links in the end, we built our own layer of invitation links and connection requests on top of that, which provides you more support and context, until you finally have to accept the iCloud share link.
I agree it is an interesting feature, works well, and I wonder why aren’t more apps built with that. Perhaps one reason is that the developer experience is somewhat esoteric. It took me quite a while to figure out how it all works and how to put all the pieces together.
As one of the Tact makers, here’s a bit of backstory. Many years ago, me and a group of friends worked at Skype where we also designed the original Skype chat, among other things. We’ve kept in touch after leaving, and kept trying out different chat tools. Most recently, we used Wire (because some of us also worked there) but more recently Wire also shifted its focus away from consumers and towards business.
So for quite a while, we had this joke, “we should make our own chat app”. Of course. That’s all it was, just a joke. But the thought kept nagging me until I did a thought experiment. “What if… it was not a joke?” What would it take? Knowing that I had no time and no money to put into it, what kind of chat app would and could I make? The thought experiment very quickly led me to iCloud that provides two vital services–users and backend.
So for past many months, we had a functional technical experiment of Tact trying to answer the question, is it possible to build Tact on iCloud like this? To date, I haven’t seen any evidence that it wouldn’t be possible.
That’s where Tact comes from. We realize there are many chat apps already out there. We aim to provide some extra choice and an option that we think should exist, but hasn’t. Here’s my subjective list of why I think Tact is different.
- Apple only.
- Straight from your device to iCloud. We never see your data.
- No ads. No data harvesting. No other weird shady things. Everything clean and honest, just as you see on our site.
- No new user account. You just use your iCloud account.
- No discovery. No one will bother you with unwanted “connection requests”.
- No private data access. We don’t ask for any data access on your device, or phone number, or anything.
- Great media experience. Share any media or files, even large. Neat web previews.
- Great desktop app.
- No funding. Completely bootstrapped indie for now. We only answer to our own conscience and personal savings. No pressure for quick growth.
Thank you for these comments. Won’t shoot the messenger, that is a valid viewpoint.
As one of the makers of Tact, I’ll say that we have mountains of writing on the site on this, which we haven’t really condensed into short bulletproof messaging yet. I’ll say this as a short version:
It’s my opinion or world view that choosing your digital platform these days comes with very long strings attached, privacy and business model being the most relevant ones. I believe in the “Apple way” more than I belive in the “Android way”. (Also add desktop to the mix.)
Tact intends to appeal to the people who share the same world view. I don’t plan to appeal to everyone.
I recognize it’s all just that: an opinion. I don’t claim mine is the only one, or even the right one. I’m not really going to argue or fight about it. I’m glad there’s a lot of choice. I want to provide more choice in the communications space, and provide an option that perhaps some like-minded people have been missing.
Messages and Tact come from the same place in that both aim to just enable people to communicate, without any further sinister or degrading motive.