Rebuilding My Favorite Messaging App
In December of 2019, TapStack shut down. I discovered TapTalk (TapStack) in 2014 during the rise of a handful of quick-shot messaging apps (Yo era). My face is even in a screenshot from a TechCrunch article by Mike Butcher in 2014. There were three things that immediately attracted me to the product.
The first was privacy. TapTalk did not have a public feed where people could like, comment, heart, favorite, repost, upvote, and amplify. The network was only for people that you already knew which made it great for sharing personal and private messages.
The second was speed. Sending a tap was faster (still faster) than any other messaging platform. Instagram and Snapchat rely on post-production filters and editing before sharing your messages. TapTalk inverted this model by placing the editing up front. Pre-production creates a quick message composition workflow for sending messages using gesture based interactions. This made TapTalk very quick to record and send a message that was extremely authentic.
The third was ephemerality. Once you watched the Tap and swiped it away, it was gone (saving was added later). This was great because it allowed for more honest sharing and consuming of media without having to worry about deleting the photo/video later to reclaim space.
Jan 31st, 2020 #
commit f9408d1b98378004b07754d1d240fa71919ac468
Author: Joe Blau <im@joeblau.com>
Date: Fri Jan 31 21:10:06 2020 -0800
Initial Commit
A few times a week between December 1st 2019 and Jan 31st 2020, I wanted to use TapTalk. There were moments with my kids that I wanted to share with my partner, parts of a trip to Sierra Leone that I wanted to share with friends and family, and other random events in the streets of SF that I wanted to share with friends in other cities. I even contemplated trying to buy the TapTalk source code with my brother; I sent an email, but never received a response.
So I rebuilt it.
I spent about 30 days building the core of the application. In that time I found other people who were working on the same thing. I’ve been using the app in a private TestFlight group and I wanted to know if anyone else is interested in joining the public beta?
Here are the current specs of the app:
- Auto sign-in via iCloud
- Send videos and images
- 1 on 1 and group messages
- Front and back camera messages
- Overlay text and drawing on media
- Interactive one finger zooming
- Apple Music audio-video sync
- Geolocation
- Zero 3rd party libraries (whole app is about 5MB)
- Asymmetric end-to-end message encryption
Sign-up for the public beta here