iMessage group chat with everyone

In a way, running a company is opting in to dozens, if not hundreds of group chats. Between internal team conversations and client-facing conversations, a lot of my time these days is spent in text based conversations on a variety of platforms. This trend has become more prevalent as the company has grown and I’m less involved in the production of design work and more focused on the overall health of the business. It’s a strange shift, but also a natural progression as a company grows.

Over the weekend, I was thinking about group chats (and how often we use them in our daily lives). Typically, we are limited to the people we have in our phones when creating a chat (though at times we’ll see ourselves thrown into spam chats, especially on platforms like WhatsApp). What if there were an option to add every single phone number on earth into a giant iMessage chat?

In addition to the absolute nightmare this would be for notifications, I believe this would require a significant rearchitecture of the iMessage platform to remove the current cap on chat size. I believe it’s about 100 people right now. There’s not much utility here, as once you get past a few dozen people it starts to feel like spam, but the long tail behaviora effects of this would be interesting to witness.

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