Hey is a wildly opinionated new email service from the makers of Basecamp

guest · Jun 15, 2020

Hey is a wildly opinionated new email service from the makers of Basecamp
Get less email, and respond to it faster — for a price
June 15, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21286466/hey-email-basecamp-price-availability-platforms-launch

The reason is Hey, a new email service from Basecamp. It’s a genuinely original take on messaging that feels like the first interesting thing to happen to email since clever apps like Mailbox and Sparrow repurposed your Gmail account, and it’s available in an open beta starting today.

With a $99-a-year price tag and some pungent opinions about how email should work, Hey is not for all or even most people. But if you find yourself chafing at the stagnation of Gmail and Outlook, or are just looking for a way to screen out most people who would ever send you a message, Hey is well worth considering.

“The last time I think anyone was really excited about email was like 16 years ago, when Gmail launched,” says Jason Fried, Basecamp’s founder and CEO. “Not much has changed since then. ... We’re trying to bring some new philosophical points of view.”
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Hey is less expensive than Superhuman, but it’s much more expensive than a Gmail or Outlook.com account. And stodgy as those giants are, they also come with developer ecosystems full of extensions that can replicate various aspects of Hey’s offering.

Fried is under no illusions that he is about to crush Gmail. “It’s the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done,” he says.
Unlike most founders I’ve spoken with, Fried says he’ll be happy if Hey can attract 100,000 customers.

In the meantime, Hey is giving email users everywhere some fresh new ideas to consider. And it’s giving the tech giants something they desperately need: competition.
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XIII · Jun 15, 2020

"HEY is invitation-only until July 2020."

(was considering the 14 day free trial to have a look)

guest · Jun 16, 2020

Hey.com exec says Apple is acting like ‘gangsters,’ rejecting App Store updates and demanding cut of sales
Apple suggests the rejection is not a mistake
June 16, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/16/...jection-ios-app-store-dhh-gangsters-antitrust

Apple is threatening to remove Hey.com from the App Store if the ambitious new email service doesn’t begin offering an in-app subscription and sharing a cut of its revenue, according to an executive at Basecamp, which makes Hey.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of Basecamp, said that Apple is acting like “gangsters,” rejecting a bug fix update and asking the company in a phone call to commit to adding an in-app subscription to prevent it from being removed. “I was taken aback by how brazen that threat was,” Heinemeier Hansson told The Verge. “I thought you were supposed to wrap the threats in euphemisms or something. But it was pretty clear.”
In an email to The Verge, Apple said that it requires all developers to follow strict guidelines around business models.

Apple also told Protocol that the app shouldn’t have been approved in the first place.
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Wow. I'm literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll REMOVE THE APP.
— DHH (@dhh) June 16, 2020
Apple initially approved the app on Friday, according to Heinemeier Hansson, but upon review of a bug fix update on Monday, Hey was rejected for not including an option to sign up within the app itself. A second version was rejected on Tuesday.

Apple takes up to a 30-percent cut of revenue on in-app purchases and subscriptions, so developers try to avoid signing up users within their app whenever possible to avoid the steep tax.
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guest · Jun 18, 2020

Apple doubles down on controversial decision to reject email app Hey
June 18, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/...ion-response-controversy-antitrust-regulation

Apple is standing behind its decision to reject future updates for the iOS app of new email service Hey. In a letter sent to Hey creator Basecamp and obtained by The Verge, Apple outlines the App Store rules it says the Hey app breaks and advises the company to adhere to developer guidelines if Basecamp wishes to continue updating the software on iOS or release it for the Mac.

It also says it declined to publish the Mac version of the app in its App Store, echoing Apple’s earlier admission that it should never have approved an iOS version of the Hey app in the first place.
The letter is signed by company’s App Review Board, but Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller made similar comments in an interview with TechCrunch published today.
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guest · Jun 19, 2020

Hey email CEO says App Store policy dispute is not about the money
June 20, 2020
https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...p-store-policy-dispute-is-not-about-the-money

Basecamp CEO Jason Fried, who also serves as chief executive of the firm's standalone email app Hey, on Friday said the dustup surrounding developer response to the tech giant's enforcement of in-app purchases is less about money than it is customer service.

In a blog post published to Hey's website, Fried noted that an outsized portion of recent discussions surrounding App Store policies has centered around Apple's developer fees. Depending on the purchase, the tech giant takes a 15% or 30% cut of all App Store transactions, purchases and subscriptions.
While an important, and for some crucial, facet of the argument, Apple's forced revenue sharing is only part of the problem.

At a more basic level, the policy inserts Apple into critical developer dealings with their users, suppressing user choice and creating a rift that can be detrimental to customer service, Fried says.
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"Does the world's largest company really get to decide how millions of other businesses can interact with their own customers? In fact, Apple's policy distances you from your customer," Fried writes.
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guest · Jun 22, 2020

Apple approves Hey email app, but the fight’s not over
What does it mean for an app to ‘work’ at launch?
June 22, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21298552/apple-hey-email-app-approval-rules-basecamp-launch

After rejecting an update last week, Apple has approved a new version of the subscription email app Hey.

But the approval is also only temporary in spirit, meant to give Hey developer Basecamp time to develop a version of the app more in line with Apple’s policies — and Basecamp’s approach to that challenge is very aggressive, as a letter posted to its website today details.
By approving Hey right now, Apple is also surely hoping to bring the focus back to the positive aspects of its $519 billion developer ecosystem as regulatory scrutiny of the App Store increases in the United States and European Union.

ey is also now able to work with enterprise customers, as Apple initially took issue with the app’s consumer focus.
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It remains to be seen whether these changes will thread the needle to Apple’s satisfaction, but Basecamp is clearly betting that Apple will have to allow future versions of the app now that it does something on launch. “We’re going to take Phil [Schiller] on his word here,” Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson tells me. “The chief complaint was that ‘you download the app and it doesn’t work,’ even though lots of apps work like that.”
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guest · Jun 23, 2020

Apple’s Response to HEY Showcases What’s Most Broken About the Apple App Store
June 22, 2020
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/...cases-whats-most-broken-about-apple-app-store

Basecamp’s new paid email service, HEY, has been making headlines recently in a very public fight with Apple over their App Store terms of service.

Just as the service was launching, the HEY developers found the new release of the app—which included important security fixes—was held up over a purported violation of the App Store rules. Specifically, Developer Rule 3.1.1, [...]
Apple alleged that HEY had violated this rule by pushing users to pay for its email service outside of the crystal prison of the App Store.

And it’s no wonder that tech companies balk at the idea of following App’s store payment pathway—as the BBC reports, Apple takes a cut of all in-app payments, often as much as 30%.
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HEY announced that they had found a way forward: negative publicity and public pressure pushed Apple to keep HEY in the App Store, at least for now
But one-off exceptions don’t address the systemic problems with the App Store, and not every app developer can launch a high-profile publicity campaign to shame Apple into doing the right thing.

Apple’s policies are opaque, arbitrarily applied, and byzantine.
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guest · Jun 25, 2020

HEY pulls feature which could expose email threads without participants’ knowledge
June 24, 2020
https://www.grahamcluley.com/hey-pu...email-threads-without-participants-knowledge/

A new service called HEY claims to have a fresh take on email.

One sign of that came to light yesterday on Twitter, when HEY user Kylie Stewart, a software engineer at Formidable Labs, tweeted a link to an email thread she had exchanged with her colleague Jon Reynolds.

Hmm… didn't realize all Hey emails can be publicly shared without the consent of both parties https://t.co/PlqxsinP7i
— Kylie (@kyliestew) June 23, 2020
Yes, you read that correctly. Kylie posted a link that allowed anybody to see her email conversation with Jon. But Jon hadn’t approved it.

And yes, HEY did display a clear message that sharing the link would allow anyone in the world to access it. But what it didn’t do is seek the permission of anyone else on that email thread.
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No-one’s denying that it’s easy to break a confidence, but HEY’s “Get a public link” functionality sits uncomfortably alongside other features which promote its desire for greater inbox privacy.
Fortunately, HEY seems to agree.

We've pulled the public links feature from HEY. After Kylie and others called out the problems around consent, I first dug in, thinking that's how forwards work, but that's a technical framing. And HEY is here to IMPROVE email, not repeat its past mistakes https://t.co/gfcmOo451g
— DHH (@dhh) June 24, 2020
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guest · Jun 25, 2020

Hey opens its email service to everyone as Apple approves its app for good
The $99-per-year email app no longer needs an invite to be used
June 25, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/25/...-launch-apple-approves-app-fight-policy-price

Hey — the new email service from Basecamp that’s been the subject of the latest fight over Apple’s App Store policies — has announced that starting today, it’ll be open for anyone to join, no invite code required.

The public launch of the service comes alongside a second piece of good news for Hey: Apple has approved Hey’s update containing proposed changes to meet App Store guidelines. The app’s version 1.0.3 update is now available, offering free, temporary 14-day burner Hey accounts with randomized addresses for iOS users, making the app “functional” by Apple’s definition when it’s first downloaded.
Hey is also adding support for multiuser corporate accounts with this update, as Apple had originally taken issue with the purely consumer-focused nature of Hey.
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