Show HN: A better, free client for iMessage power-users

2 points by jmatan 13 days ago | 3 comments

TLDR: Your iMessage inbox is a mess. Go to attention dot righthand dot ai.

it's a free app for mac. It's like Superhuman for iMessage. ___

You text your friends and family in iMessage. You text your colleagues in iMessage. If you run a business, you likely text prospects and leads in iMessage. I text our customers in iMessage - I want them to know they've got the fastest way to reach me. In 2026 you even text your AI agents in iMessage (Linq raises $20M to enable AI assistants to live in iMessage, Apple approves Poke as the first AI agent on its Messages for Business platform).

The point is: your iMessage inbox is overloaded. Even more than email, it's become the inbox where everything important happens. But it's not built for everything! It's basically optimized for friends & family groupchats.

Being an iffy texter is OK (debatable) with friends. But the founders and investors we talk to routinely describe this niche pain of coördinating business in iMessage. So we distilled the lessons from Superhuman, viz., the email experience should be fast af and beautiful and shortcut-laden, and we applied them directly to the inboxes that are hard to use - starting with iMessage.

Attention is the first app that allows you to become a power-user of iMessage.

I'm finally able to label and divide my iMessages into different folders. I can set reminders and follow-ups with a keystroke.

We are obsessed with the potential value of an agent who triages every message before you even see it. We love the concept of every new message arriving with pre-work done and a human-in-the-loop Approval Card curated by the agent with 3 differentiated next steps. It ships with an MCP - just point your favorite flavor of coding agent at it.

As far as the actual app: Your data is yours, fully local in LanceDB + SQLite & never leaves your machine unless you turn on the AI agent, at which point data just goes to whichever AI provider you chose.

For now, just know that Attention ships with AI features "off" by default and it will always be free to use.

attention dot righthand dot ai

this post was written without the use of language models by me, Joseph. would love to chat and answer any questions in the comments

ymir_e 13 days ago |

I do like the idea of getting everything into one place, but I'm a bit concerned about how it gets the data from each platform.

The platforms have a pretty huge incentive to keep you on their platform, so any top of automation/botting is actively something they try to shut down, or am I incorrect about this?

For example LinkedIn needs to serve ads, if you're able to bypass their UI entirely, you're not getting ads. Or am I missing something here?

Would be cool to hear your thinking around this as well as what technical approach was taken.

notanaiagent 13 days ago | |

I agree with all that Joseph commented above. I'd add that we're not removing users from the LinkedIn or Instagram scroll - if you want to view content on LinkedIn or any other social platform, you still need to go to the platform itself. We just wanted to make it easier to stay on top of the 5+ different messaging platforms we're all expected to check.

I think about it like an inverted WULPH.com (the office). I just want to have 1 app that is the source of all my comms.

- Julius

jmatan 13 days ago | |

yeah, great question.

Many platforms right now are making the difficult decision whether to: (a) wall off their data from programmatic access (agents) altogether in service of keeping real humans on their site, or (b) allow programmatic access for the increasing number of users who are demanding their agents interact with the data

We obviously believe humanity and society and cyberspace should go in the direction of (b)

LinkedIn is an interesting case because their policy, so far, has been to aggressively restrict agents from interacting with their site. But this is because they serve human-centered ads which most of us find aggressive and annoying (I'm thinking of messages appearing in my DMs that appear real but are in fact sponsored). So you would still see that "ad" even if you were using Attention. It would just be easier to label it as "promotional" and i would prefer my agent does that so I do not even have to see it.

I want linkedin to serve my agent ads that are so interesting and personally compelling that my agent thinks i should hear about it.

Just my 2¢ - perhaps my cofounder will chime in with his own thoughts

- Joseph