Design details from Honk's live messaging app

Written by AI

TLDR: Benji catalogues Honk's real-time messaging interactions: live typing bubbles, presence animations, emoji collisions, custom fonts and sounds, arguing playfulness wasn't enough for product-market fit.
Filed note: Benji's postmortem on Honk, the real-time messaging app with no send button. A catalogue of the micro-interactions that made it playful, and why that wasn't enough.

Highlights: Honk took a completely different approach. It had two chat bubbles, no send button, no chat history, and no drafts.
The core interaction model that defined the app
As you typed, your chat bubble dynamically resized; when you paused, it shrank back down.
One of many live presence details
Users could send (or more commonly spam) as many emojis as they wanted, in any order, even if this made the conversation briefly unreadable for both people.
Honk facilitated over 2.6 billion characters typed, 170 million Honks sent, and hundreds of millions of images, audio, and videos exchanged.
Scale reached before the app was sunset
Excerpt: Before pivoting to build Family, I worked with many of the same talented people on Honk, a real-time messaging app. We discontinued Honk when we shifted our focus to Family, and when we were eventually acquired, the Honk IP was transferred over along with everything else.
From benji.org