Snowball for Android Is Your Single Window to All Other Messaging Apps

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Android users have a new app to play with, it is called Snowball Beta and it will become your one-stop shop for all of your messaging needs. Snowball looks to be your single unified inbox bringing together messages from Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, WhatsApp and more. Snowball is free in the Google Play Store.

If that is not enough, Snowball will bring you your messages on a floating icon like you’d find with Link Bubble, or, I suppose the more appropriate comparison would be Facebook’s Chat Heads.

Snowball is the brainchild of Anish Acharya and Jeson Patel. Their combined resumes include Google, Microsoft, Amazon and SocialDeck with a couple little projects you may have heard of, Google Play Games and the mobile side of Google+. Snowball is as much a solution for their own fragmented social experiences as it is a great free app for us to play with.

Snowball currently supports Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Line, Slack, SMS,Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp and WeChat. They say these are just the services to get things rolling, that other services can be added in just a few days each.

The approach is fairly simple, as is the experience at this point. Instead of officially plugging into the APIs, if any, of the individual services, Snowball works off of your Android system notifications to collect the messages and bring them to you. If it matters, they say this is an Android only thing, iPhone users can only look on with envy, as the system notification technique is not possible on iOS.

To be clear, Snowball is not a messaging service, it is simply a unified inbox for the other services that you already have apps installed. Stay tuned to our Android customizationseries starting October 16th, we’ll be starting a project of our own, for you to follow along, that rocks the same sort of functionality.

While this may be the first time many of us have heard of Snowball, it is already en-route to bigger things. They have announced a round of seed funding worth more than $2 million, and a sly tease that Snowball is just the first layer of a larger app that is in the pipes.

Snowball is free in the Google Play Store, including an update that rolled out today that fixed all of the initial Xposed module compatibility issues, if that was a concern for you.

What do you say, is a single unified inbox the thing you need to keep your messaging in order, or do you prefer the segregation of the apps?

Messaging apps are among the most popular apps on both Android and iOS. Check the top apps in either app store and you’ll come across several messaging apps. While different messaging apps serve different audiences and, sometimes, a different purpose, it can get tiresome to have multiple chat apps on your smartphone.

Google Ventures funded app Snowball tries to solve that problem by unifying popular messaging services, by letting users access multiple services at once. At launch, it supports SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Twitter, Line,WeChat, Snapchat, and Slack. It acts as an inbox for notifications from all these apps. The app uses chat heads for notifications, similar to the pop-ups Facebook Messenger shows on the Android home screen.

Snowball is one of the few apps that went Android first. This is because iOS doesn’t allow third-party apps to integrate deeply with the system. Snowball doesn’t rely on authentication from each messaging app it supports, but integrates with Android notifications to pull show new messages on the home screen.

Techcrunch reported that the app’s founders Anish Acharya and Jeson Patel sold their first company, SocialDeck, to Google in 2010. The report said Patel founded Google Play Games, while Acharya later left Google for Google Ventures.

In a blog post on Medium, Snowball founder Anish Acharya wrote, “Our conversations are spread across more apps than ever: my fiancé only uses SMS and my co-founder uses WhatsApp. My sisters are into Facebook Messenger and I’m pretty sure our office dog Luna prefers Line, though I haven’t yet found a way to confirm.”

Highlighting the fact that the idea behind the app was to unify the messaging experience, Acharya wrote, “We built Snowball to bring these conversations together; one place for all of the messages from all of the social apps you already love. We didn’t want another social app, we wanted a way for all of our existing social apps to work better together.”

Snowball is available via Google Play. At the time of filing this report, it wasn’t available for download in India.

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Snowball for Android Is Your Single Window to All Other Messaging Apps
Source: OpenAndroid