No, those are totally different. They're just Electron shells around web versions of chat apps. They're also extremely resource-intensive and buggy.

Someone forked Rambox and kept it FOSS, and it's called Hamsket.

There is also an OSS hard-fork of Franz called Ferdi, for anyone interested. Been using it for some time, I don't love nor hate it.

Those are glorified browsers wrapping the web based clients in dedicated "tabs". AFAIK it looks like Beeper hosts a matrix<->service bridge between those platforms, and their client actually unifies messages in a single inbox. Seems to be different.

https://texts.com - it's not released yet but you can sign up for early access.

Interesting! It would be great though if you could sign up without a Google account. One of the reasons I want something like this is the data collection of all these separate apps. I'm trying to get away from Google :)

Anyone who is already in the early-access?

This looks like an interesting alternative and I am looking forward to trying both of them out once I get in

Yep, check out some tweets by our users here: https://twitter.com/TextsHQ

Ah you are the creator! I had a couple of questions:

1. Are you using unofficial APIs or do you have custom bridges much like Beeper?

2. How would you deal with messaging apps like Snapchat?

Also, you were right in saying "app invites are the new currency of SV"[0]. Keep up the good work!

[0] https://twitter.com/KishanBagaria/status/1294754273998172160...

> Are you using unofficial APIs or do you have custom bridges much like Beeper?

All platform integrations were developed in-house from the ground up. We don't use the Matrix protocol but support it.

> How would you deal with messaging apps like Snapchat?

We don't plan on supporting Snapchat since it's single session only.

why login with Google and not regular email?