A new messaging app Honk has made its debut in the market. Honk aims at making messaging more interactive and maintaining a real-time experience.
Honk also avoid you from getting ghosted or waiting for some response from your friends for hours. As on Honk, you communicate with someone on the live as you type, with each of your typos, spaces, and even the think time before you send that ‘risky message’ in the normal messaging app can be seen by the other person.
Honk has no function of saved chat history just like Snapchat. Also, Honk inform the other user when you leave the chat. All in all, Honk is trying to give users a more real-life experience.
Suppose you have to talk to someone, then you can send them a honk which is a hard-to-miss notification to join your chat. If it’s more urgent you can spam someone’s phone with notification by that honk button if they are not using the app. And if they are using the app, they will be flooded with colorful emojis.
?️ Need to get someone’s attention fast? Honk them! They’ll get a notification to come to the chat. If it’s super important, you can spam the Honk button — that’s hard to miss. pic.twitter.com/VqcinmeeT2
— Honk (@usehonk) December 22, 2020
This app is only available for iPhone users for now, and will soon be launched for Andriod. After setting up your account and putting your profile pic, you will have to choose your username. Then you can add friends and tap their name to start messaging.
This “live typing” experience is very similar to the older communication technology, like the early instant messaging app ICQ, or the innovative collaboration tool Google Wave, for example.
Honk’s limit is 160 characters
Honk limit your thoughts to 160 characters only and if you run out of those available characters then you have to start from scratch on the same screen. The screen refresh after you double-tap the arrow.
You can also send emoji, open camera roll, and share images on Honk. In this app, you share huge emojis that temporarily fill the screen of the receiver.
✨ With Magic Words, you can assign any emoji to any word or phrase, which automatically trigger effects as you type. It’s the best way to personalize your chats and bring them to life. Set up to 50 unique Magic Words per chat! pic.twitter.com/2BYUyNrEzz
— Honk (@usehonk) December 23, 2020
Notably, this app is mainly targeted and aggressively marketed towards Gen-Z and largely the teenage users in the West. Even when you are setting up your profile the app provides the exact age for users unless you are 21+. The last option on the list of ages is “21+”, this can clearly hurt many Millennials’ hearts but as they say it is what it is.
Per its website, Honk is the flagship product from software company and app publisher Los Feliz Engineering (LFE), which is backed by investors including Naval Ravikant, Elad Gil, Brian Norgard, David Tisch, Jeff Fagnan, Ryan Hoover, Sarah Downey, Josh Hannah, Sahil Lavingia and others.
“It’s exceptionally well designed,” said Product Hunt founder and Weekend Fund investor Ryan Hoover, about Honk. “[Honk founder] Benji [Taylor] and team labored over the small details, from the animations to the sounds. They’re also super focused on speed,” he added.
“We’ve been working on Honk for a while now. Our goal is to make messaging fun, and empower people to communicate in new, creative ways that take relationships deeper,” Taylor told TechCrunch. “Ultimately though, we’re a small team building this for ourselves and our friends. If other people like it, all the better,” he said.
