iMessage time spent reading

Yesterday was a big day. Not only was I in meetings for 6 hours, I also had to write one of the more stressful/important emails I’ve written in recent history. I’m not gonna get into it, because it’s a whole thing.

Anyway, as I was writing the email I started thinking about a feature where you could see how long the sender of the email spent composing their message. Then I mentioned that to a friend and they pivoted to iMessage, which is more universal, and generally a playground for being unhinged.

Then I thought about the existing “Read” and “Delivered” indicators. What if it simply said “Read for 2s before sending”? This is interesting because you would need to implement some sort of eye tracking or this functionality to work at any level of scale. I hope Apple would never implement something like this, but at this point whos to say?

In terms of unhinged-ness, this feels like it sits at a 5/10, it’s crazy but not that crazy.

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