shawn ritchie dot com

Facebook Messenger. Google Hangouts. iMessages. Pushbullet. What'sApp. Snapchat. Slack. SMS. AIM (lol).

I am fucking sick and tired of Messaging apps. Not because I hate messaging folks; NAY! I much prefer it to having to actually (ick) talk to people like, in person or, worse, over the phone.

No, I'm sick of how fucking MANY of the goddamned things I have to keep installed to stay in touch with everyone, everywhere. And I'm further sick of the ones I use most not existing on all platforms I need to use them on.

At the most, I would think two of these fucking things would suffice; the one you use to talk to family and friends, and whatever work inflicts on you. But no; some co-workers fear change so they're using AOL still because that's what IT approved in 1997 and that's that. Other co-workers will use Slack with you but IT doesn't trust it so you can't do a general roll-out because some guys don't have admin rights to install anything on their machines because why would you trust the guys who build the stuff that makes all of the company's money with any level of control over their personal work machines?

Over on the personal side of things, iMessages is great and you can use it on your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac but WHOOOPS! Apple likes to pretend PC's somehow still don't exist so you get nothing on Windows (well, iTunes exists there because they can directly make money from it but let's not pretend iTunes is anything but a brutally painful experience on any platform and that's a post for another day…) so have fun typing on your phone while you're at work and your wife needs to know how to get Netflix to work on your mother-in-law's TV. Meanwhile, Pushbullet is every bit as good if not better than iMessages if you're rocking the Android lifestyle 'cuz it's got great apps for phones, PC's and a fine browser plugin for Safari on the Mac but BZZZZT what if you're in that common boat of having an Android phone but an iPad tablet? Go fuck yourself, that's what, because Apple will dig up the corpse of Steve Jobs and let Bill Gates have sex with it live during their next keynote before they'll allow a non-Apple app touch the messaging stack on their iOS devices.

Facebook Messenger could allllllmost fill this niche as it exists for every possible platform up to and including your toaster, but then you have the problem of, if you're a middle-aged white guy like me, of having a lot of folks you actually want to talk to who don't have Facebook accounts because they think Mark Zuckerberg is an Illuminati or Freemason or they somehow think that not using FB prevents a single goddamned thing when it comes to corporations and/or the government building up a profile on them (SPOILER ALERT: it doesn't; you're fucked, coming and going, always, without exception) and so nope, that can't do.

Google Hangouts is such a shitty app that even Google doesn't use it anymore.

I don't even understand what the fuck Snapchat is but the only way I can get my dealer to respond to me is to send him a picture of my dick with my order written on it in glitter via that app so I have to keep it around and come to think of it that's kinda fuckin' weird of the guy, no?

I just want one messaging app that does all of the following:

• Works on EVERYTHING. Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, WinPhone… I guess Blackberry can fuck off at this point, but that's about all I'm willing to forsake. And I prefer dedicated apps on the desktop, but would settle for a robust webapp that properly integrates with Chrome or Safari's desktop push notifications.

• Can talk to all of these other stupid formats. Remember Adium? Pidgin? You had ONE app and could Instant Message people on MSN, AOL, Yahoo, IRC, one app that spoke to all the other popular platforms… I realize this is probably a dead letter at this point, because Adium and those others cared primarily about helping people communicate, whereas today every commo platform cares most about being able to harvest as much of your information as possible, locking you into their platform, and selling your profile to advertisers. So, I'd settle for just "if I have a valid phone # or email, this app should be able to communicate with you from me over text messaging".

• Syncs properly. If I read a text from my wife on my phone, I don't want the desktop app to still think that message is unread. This should be simple. For some reason, it is not. IMessages does decent with this, but sometimes it gets confused about what device I'm actually on and never shows me a new text when I'm actively using, say, my iPad, but the app on my phone, which is on a desk somewhere far away from me, is showing the red notification pip just fine. Dumb. And infuriating.

• I'd prefer if these apps never showed me emoji. Like, EVER.

• But they should easily show me attachments or pop out links to the browser on whatever device I'm looking at.

It feels like this will be possible one day soon; Pushbullet is basically there, but only for folks who are all-in on Android for their phone and tablets. I am not, and switch around, so it's just close enough to be infuriating when I bump up against the edge cases where it's not.

Then again, maybe not. I have adult friends these days who literally don't bother with any sort of actual computer in their life. They have a smartphone and that's it, so native SMS covers them entirely. So maybe this will never happen and I should just go fuck myself.