[sc:software-category ]There is a plethora of messaging apps out there these days but most of them are tied/owned to big social networks of some kind.
I recently talked a bit about Bleep but development of it has been pretty slow. I found Threema in the Windows Phone Store and decided to give it a go.
First things first, it’s not free, but that’s to be expected. Threema focuses on security and that pretty much negates a “free” business model that involves advertising as their revenue stream.
It is cross-platform, so you don’t have to have Windows Phone to use it, though there is no Windows version.
Setup is simple, they use a random sample of swiping to generate and private/public key pair and then your off t the races.
Threema is both secure and can be anonymous as well as it doesn’t require you to enter your phone number of e-mail address as part of the sign-up process.
Of course you have to find someone else who has Threema to message them but that isn’t a big hurdle since the app is only $1.99.
Adding contacts is perhaps the only weak point I found with Threema. A friend downloaded it and I scanned the QR code for him. It added him to my contacts and so I sent him a message. On his end, there wasn’t an obvious way to add me to his contacts (without scanning my QR code) but after fiddling around a bit we found you could start a new chat with me and then add my to the contacts list from there.
Threema supports group chats and delivery and read receipts and just about everything else you might want in a messaging app so I’m going to see if I can get a few more people on it and give it a good work out.
I’m still interested to see what happens with Bleep, but it may be a while before anything happens with it and even longer still before there is a Windows Phone version.
