Notes on getting paid for your attention, and on the messenger it arrives in.
How the money works and where it comes from, the scam patterns worth recognising, and the engineering behind doing all of it on your own phone. No announcements, no growth hacks.
How the money works
Where the euro comes from, what a poll is worth, and why we pay per answer instead of per completed questionnaire.
13 September 20266 min read
Every app that offers to pay you owes you this page. Here is where the money comes from, what an answer is worth, and what has to be true before any of it reaches your account.
How to spot a parcel delivery scam text
The fake courier message is the most successful SMS fraud in the world right now. Here is exactly how it is built, and the four signals that give it away every time.
28 July 20266 min read
SecuritySMS was never private, and what that actually means for you
Text messages travel in the clear through infrastructure built in the 1980s. That is not a scandal, but it should change what you send.
21 July 20266 min read
PerspectiveThe hidden cost of five messaging apps
It is not the switching. It is the background process your brain runs to keep track of which conversation lives where. That attention has always had a price; it just never had a rate.
14 July 20265 min read
GuidesWhat Android's default SMS app role actually does
Changing it sounds drastic and feels irreversible. It is neither, and understanding why makes the decision easy.
7 July 20265 min read
SecuritySmishing: the anatomy of a bank fraud text
Bank impersonation is the most expensive SMS fraud there is. Taking one apart line by line shows why it works on careful people.
23 June 20267 min read
ProductWhy Textly does not support Signal or iMessage
Two of the most requested integrations we will never build, and the reasons are different for each.
16 June 20265 min read
SecurityEnd-to-end encryption, explained without the hand-waving
What the term actually promises, what it does not cover, and why "encrypted" on a marketing page can mean almost nothing.
9 June 20266 min read
GuidesHow to keep your messages when switching Android phones
What transfers automatically, what does not, and the two things worth doing before you wipe the old device.
2 June 20265 min read
PerspectiveThe messages you forget: appointments, invoices and promises
Your inbox is already a calendar, a to-do list and a filing cabinet. It is just an extremely bad one.
26 May 20266 min read
PerspectiveWhat a survey panel knows about you, and what we do not
An inventory of what is inferable from an inbox, and from a panel profile. Both lists are longer than people expect. Ours is the short one on purpose.
19 May 20266 min read
ProductNotifications are broken. Here is how we approach them.
Every app treats its own notifications as maximally important, because no app can see the others. A unified inbox can.
12 May 20265 min read
PerspectiveA short history of SMS, and why it refuses to die
It was an afterthought with a 160-character limit, invented on a typewriter. Three decades and several funerals later, it is still the only messaging system everyone has.
5 May 20266 min read
GuidesHow to check whether an app is really offline
Privacy claims are easy to make and, unusually, quite easy to verify. Four methods, from ten seconds to a proper afternoon.
28 April 20266 min read
Read it, then try it.
Everything described here ships in the app: five channels in one inbox, sorted on your own phone.