What the hell happened to messaging apps?

I remember when we had Adium and you could connect almost all of your chat services to one client.

Some features were missing, but the basic texting part usually worked.

We had a way to set our status to online, away, or offline. There was no need for Do Not Disturb or notification management since you just went offline and nobody could reach you.

Actually, you can still use Slack like this.

Some services even queued up your messages, so the next time you went online, new messages awaited you.

I could even set the currently played music as my status.

Almost all messaging app had some form of proper native Mac app.

Remember that Skype for Mac was actually a pretty decent Mac app with AppleScript support.

These days, it’s just an Electron app, although nobody uses Skype anymore…

My friends used MSN Messenger too, which was kind of a crappy client, but at least you could use it through Adium.

These days, I have to use Cardhop to have proper messaging integration in my contact list to have a central place to jump into the different clients.

Almost all clients are stupid Electron apps on the desktop.

Mobile clients are better: at least some of the biggest players have proper native apps on iOS.

Facebook Messenger for Mac is a React Native app, which is a bit better than Electron.

I can’t go offline anymore; instead, I have to manage my notifications and schedule them using Focus modes .

I kinda miss old IM apps.