I imagine with the Apple situation they are working on adding support currently however, even if it’s reduced. They need an iOS plan B.
I hope they don't. Apple needs to feel the pain their evil and immoral behaviour is inflicting on the world.
In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing.
If folks like Basecamp don't start standing up to Apple, then nothing stops Apple from just outright killing the majority of mobile software development. And while it's not directly their fault, at some point iPhone users need to recognize that their purchase of an iPhone is directly funding the destruction of the innovative / creative software they claim to want to have.
If you like Hey, maybe stop buying a phone that's trying to murder Hey. If you run a company like Hey, maybe stop giving in to the mafia's extortion demands.
That's true, but I would argue, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that email is an area where we don't want or need much innovation. Email works fine and has for decades. In many cases, "innovation" (except at the protocol level) has made things worse.
I've seen a bunch of "new takes" on email over the years, but none of them have been interesting to me because I don't want to run my mail on something goofy and proprietary that I can't easily and (mostly) painlessly migrate somewhere else.
Also, I'm not sure email needs a "new take."
For example, a standardized method that allows you to tell your email server to send an email at a specific time.
Exactly. That's why I'd like to use their app as an IMAP client to retrieve emails from my gmail account. Not the other way around.
I think imbox is embarrassing, and I don’t like the graphic design, but it’s definitely innovative and good for them for doing something different.
Impbox and Imbox.
But that is an awful name that sounds like a toddler not getting their consonants right.
Things like that are good filters to find you user base and focus your resources.
edit: typo :D
With new products, humans need an anchor to familiar features in order to feel comfortable.
What Makes Things Cool https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/what-ma...
But I still think it's a cool product and luckily I won't have to hear Jason Fried talk while using it.
Perhaps they plan to introduce custom domains in future? Maybe this just didn't fit into the initial release?
Most probably.
This is how basecamp always did thing, even back when it was called 37signals: they release a MVP, they generate money as early as they can, then they start agile feedback loop, improving the product throught many iterations.
They were one of the teams that made agile popular after all.
They also promote the philosophy of rejecting features and not noting the requests for them down.
Only a feature that has been requested and rejected enough times pass their "filter" of something that should be added to the product.
I'm betting a custom domain name will pass such filter and end up being implemented in one year or two.
No feature is worth the hassle of getting everyone to update my email address.
I also noticed the "Imbox" but i dont believe i thought about it for more than 1 second.
When I see a typo, I instinctively go back and re-read the word or sentence to make sure I didn't misread something.
The last thing I want in my e-mail client is additional mental overhead. It's a minor detail, but it's also unnecessary, subtracts more than it adds, and it's easy to fix.
This entire discussion thread exists because of that one little thing. In other words, it adds marketing value. Getting people to discuss your product, even if negative, is still free marketing.
Because I dont see lots of Hey from marketing side, I do see lots of hey on the argument against Apple App Store.
Hey is a mailbox app that costs $99/year, doesn’t support IMAP (edit: or POP), and with a UI straight out of 2007. This app would never be getting this kind of attention otherwise. It’s brilliant marketing and is exactly the type of thing they talk about in their book.
I've got my own domain hosted on google apps, and it just works. Rarely get spam, I'm used to the UI, I don't want to change my email address because I don't need to.
Having said the above, I guess I am not the target audience for this.
I’ve been using it for about 3 days so far.
The product is pretty great regardless of the funny spelling, they are launching a business version in a few months to allow you to bring your own custom domains. The notable twists I’ve seen so far is the inbox filtering logic that allows you to blatantly say “I don’t want emails from this address ever.” Gmail’s “mark spam” stuff doesn’t quite work for this and stuff eventually gets unmarked. It’s like the worlds easiest unsubscribe with no run around with unsubscribe dark patterns. The privacy stuff looks pretty good too. It seems to me that the iOS app is unbelievably fast (ironic considering...) like time to go from closed app to “see new emails” is easily A few seconds faster than both Gmail and Outlook. I’m tempted to pay to be honest. I’ve been really happy. But then there’s the whole “will I ever get an updated iOS app?” Thing that puts water on that.
Edit: why am I being downvoted? The Head of the House Antitrust Commission directly called Apple’s behavior out and the EU announced Investigations of Apple’s behavior. The rest is just my option of a product. Lol
Apple is not doing anything illegal (future regulations might change that), nor anything horrible.
There might be conflicts of interest between App Store and likes of Apple Music and Spotify having to pay IAP fees, but there's nothing wrong with 15-30% distributor fee to access a unified market of 155 countries where all the headache of payments, local sales taxes, APIs, etc are taken care of.
People forget the 2000s with Windows Mobile, CAB files and xda-developers, and the 50% shops take to get your software/game distributed and on a shelf in front of customers.
"If you have to set up a domain to point to your help pages to explain why something isn't a typo, you're doing it wrong".
It gets people talking, just normal marketing. It's not like people can't use it without understanding why it says Imbox.
Founders: Thanks
Users of Hey/Basecamp: You have a typo
Founders: No, this isn't a typo. And we built a website to show you're wrong: http://itsnotatypo.com
I think they should create a way to rename the Imbox though, so that when people get it, they don't have to look at the weird "typo" anymore.
I think it's genius.
The Basecamp folks are opinionated and strong-willed, so I'm not sure that they will back down on the unfortunately named "imbox," but I hope they do. Fortunately this isn't as colossal of a mistake as the no-delete-gmail mistake, and in the end, it's not a huge deal (q.v., the name of the iPad was a big deal to some when it came out) but they clearly were too clever for their own good here.
Doesn't seem very fair. I thought at this point hacker news' spam detectors would flare up and stop bumping everything 'Hey' to the top.
Not trying to put on a tinfoil hat but, there is simply no way in hell to get this level of PR and attention unless a significant portion of all Hey activities have been carefully and methodically planned for weeks and months.
I deal with the same difficulties myself and the App store mafia cut is a real problem but I just don't think I'll ever be able to trust them again with such aggressive PR tactics.
I love rails so I was hoping this would be awesome but between the invite-only sign up and seeing some of the impractical design decisions they have implemented, I don't think I will be using it, at least not any time soon.
I really want someone to develop a "better email" for the general populace that would be intuitive and offer chat-app-inspired improvements that could really supplant email but seeing what I have this service really seems like something geared toward techies.
Edit: actually, it turns out I'm just an idiot and shouldn't comment on things before I fully wake up. That's my b.
https://twitter.com/manuel_frigerio/status/12739352538879098...
Which would be a reasonably line of thought, were hey not an e-mail service.
Nothing much succeeds in actually changing the way it works.
What does work is developing communication systems unrelated to email ie slack.
My prediction is that Hey will fail but will pivot into something else which the developers will take as a victory.
All their branding, personal and professional, is a decade old.
I'm sure the tech teams at Shopify and Sephora, both of which regularly do 50k+ requests per second, or maybe Airbnb, Github or Hulu will be super eager to hear your opinions about how Rails is slow and can't scale.
To each their own, sure, but yikes there are so many more things in the world to be annoyed by right now.