AiO-Messenger

AiO was an app project aiming to create a multi messenger that displays all communication with one person in a unified chat history, with the goal of uniting the fragmented world of modern communication.

Motivation and Concept

The most versatile communication device of today is the smartphone. Several communication channels for such devices exist. But herein lies the boon and bane of modern communication.

Too many options cause confusion and in the worst case lead to fragmentation and separation, because not everyone wants to install hundreds of almost redundant apps.This is where AiO comes into play. Our goal is to provide a messaging solution that combines as many of those channels into one unified chat history as possible. The user shall focus on the question of whom to address, not how to.

The project was initiated and maintained by Marcus Held and me.

Technical Background

We designed AiO with modern software development patterns in mind and thus created a flexible and extensible system, with interfaces and strategies for groups of related communication styles. Due to this there is very few architectural overhead involved when implementing new protocols. Right now AiO supports sending and receiving SMS as an examplary implementation of that concept.

Current State of Development

Due to our recently rather demanding involvement in university studies, jobs and other projects, we are lacking the time to keep up active development of AiO. We underestimated the effort needed to integrate different protocols and third party APIs, which is a very valuable lesson for future projects. This does not mean the project is over, as we have a solid and extensible code base to build upon and may contribute to AiO again whenever we have more free capacities.