Snowball wants to be your Android phone's universal inbox
These days, all of the messages we get on our phones live in separate little boxes, destined never to mingle... unless some crafty developers and entrepreneurs force them to. As it turns out, that's exactly what a Google Ventures-backed startup called Snowball just did -- its creators made an Android app that pulls all your disparate missives into a single, simple inbox that you can scan at a glance. Facebook messages? Fine. Whatsapp texts? No worries. Snapchats? You get where we're going. Co-founder Anish Acharya says the aggregating app works with the 10 most popular messaging services out there right now (including good ol' SMS, Line, Hangouts and Slack just because they like it), which means there's a very good chance it'll be right up your alley. Sounds a lot like the universal inbox we've been clamoring for, doesn't it?
Well, it's close.
To the team's credit, the setup process is dead simple -- all you really have to do is wade through some splash screens and give the app access to your notifications (more on that later). Once that's all done, Snowball will exist in form of a cutesy ever-present icon, sort of like a persisting Facebook chat head that hides when there's nothing new to see. A quick swipe on the icon will open up your inbox to reveal all the textual treasures within, but alas, you can't actually respond from there -- tapping one of them launches the associated app from whence you can do the deed. That's perhaps the only real bummer about the (currently beta) app: it does a fine job of rounding up your messages, but by virtue of the way these messaging apps are designed and created it isn't going to be a truly one-stop shop.
Acharya says it won't be too difficult to add support for buzzy new messaging apps down the road, but that's essentially because Snowball works by capturing and rendering your message notifications within the app. Alas, it's a pretty neat little trick that, as you might imagine, doesn't exactly work on iOS. Don't count an iPhone-friendly version out completely, though: it'll take more concerted work with the developers of those apps, which could lead to benefits for users on both sides of the smartphone OS divide.
