Quickie promises to make mobile messaging more spontaneous

Another self-destructing app hits the market today with the launch of Quickie for both Android and iOS.

And while there are tons of these apps on the market, Quickie isn’t necessarily just jumping onto the bandwagon. The company and its founders are trying to reinvent the way we message.

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“Everything started with email, then came messaging. Messaging is more brief and fast and so on, so we were trying to figure out what’s next,” said cofounder Erez Pilosof.

They call it “live messaging.” Yes, messaging is always live, but what Quickie does differently is that it has applied the self-destructing video messaging model, pioneered by Snapchat, to text.

When I sat down with Pilosof to check out the app, he typed out a message to his colleague’s iPhone that said “hey” and then “what’s up?” Instead of the usual text bubbles appearing on the receiving end, bursts of text materialized for a few seconds, just long enough to read, before fading away.

“Texting apps are becoming very complex, like email. You have to take care of it and manage it and delete,” said Pilosof. That’s a lot of work for a bunch of meaningless text conversations, he said.

Pilosof is no stranger to digital communications. He’s also the cofounder of Hop, an email client that converts email interactions into messaging-like conversations. To take messaging to a new level, Pilosof thinks ephemerality is key. It not only makes messaging low maintenance, it lets users replicate the spontaneity of in-person conversations.

To that effect, all messages on Quickie get deleted from your phone and Quickie’s servers after 24 hours, or immediately after they’re read. In addition to disintegrating text, Quickie also features a gif making tool and sketch sharing that looks exactly like the Apple Watch doodle demo.

One limitation of the app is that you’re only able to have eight contacts, though there is a workaround. If someone else adds you as one of their eight contacts, you can accept them as an additional contact.

This makes Quickie more personal, but it also means you can’t use Quickie for all your messaging needs — just for your closest buds. This may be a barrier to wide acceptance.

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It’s also uncertain how much of a need there is for text that disappears right before your eyes. For instance, if I get a text during work that I can’t immediately respond to that then disappears, I will forget anyone ever texted me. I rely on that message hanging around for at least 24 hours.

On the other hand, users are increasingly bemused and enchanted with messaging that disappear — and this is exactly the trend that Quickie is appealing to. I can certainly see a use case here for a quick “what’s up” or “where you at?” But, as we move away from phone conversations to text, there is often more we need to communicate than just a simple hello. When I asked the Quickie team about longer messages or just longer conversations via text, they admitted that Quickie doesn’t facilitate that kind of interaction.

In our desire to make messaging more efficient, it’s possible we forget that casual conversation and small talk isn’t the only kind of communication that needs a platform.

However, Quickie does picks up on another trend that’s quickly emerging. Pilosof said he has no intention of using advertising as a revenue model when the company starts to monetize. Rather, Quickie will offer upgrade options and in-app purchases to generate profit, like WhatsApp and Wickr.

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As other companies are doubling down on data driven advertising, it’s great to see a messaging app steer away from capitalizing on user data.