Why I chose Hey

As work is becoming remote, I’m realizing that writing skills are more and more essential. To further practice my skills of writing concisely and effectively, I’m going to try writing in a blog post here and there. I’m gonna start this one by talking about why I chose Hey for my email.

Last year, I realized that letting Google own my email is a bad idea, more so if many many people do it. If you think about it, Google is able to know about every single item I buy on Amazon, or which bank accounts I use and how much money I make, just looking at the notifications I receive from such services. This is bad for my privacy and at scale is bad for everyone.

I also realized that the model of having an email protocol and an email client is broken, it limits innovation because client developers have to work on top of protocol designed decades ago. For example, using Apple Mail for Gmail does not give you push notifications for new messages if you want them, because email protocols don’t offer this use case.

I wanted a vertically integrated solution that would give me a great user experience and I want to pay for it in order to have my privacy.

There are many email providers but many of them strive to have support for legacy protocols and don’t do much more than that, their apps for example are subpar. So my focus quickly narrowed down to iCloud and Hey.

The former because I already pay for it, in order to store safely my photos, so I could get email there for free. But I thought that the interface of Mail is not going to change much for two reasons:

Apple Mail has to support the legacy IMAP and SMTP protocols, thus the User Experience isn’t going to change anytime soon
Apple then can’t leverage a vertical integration with iCloud to provide a better experience, and even if they want to do so, the benefit will be trivial because most people use Gmail anyway

Hey instead, has the same privacy focus that Apple has and on top of it, they created a vertically integrated platform. This platform allows them to build what they have today: Imbox, Screener, Feed, Paper Trail and my bet is that it will allow them to iterate at a faster speed. Also, they are a small business that does not need to compete at Apple and Google scale, so they can keep innovating as long as enough people pay for Hey.

This is where I placed my bet then, and so far I don’t regret it