A New App Wavelength Arrives, Aiming to Put Group Chat on the Front to Change the Narrative
Syed Imran Haider 
A new app Wavelength is available on Mac and iOS devices to the general public. It has come from the makers of Telepath – a social network that hit the market in 2020 but went off by the end of the last year. Unlike, Wavelength aims to bring group chats to the front.
Using instant messaging apps like Telegram, iMessage, and WhatsApp is not uncommon for anyone owning a smartphone. Such apps offer ideally designed platforms to make personal interactions conveniently possible. Unlike other apps, Wavelength aims to create threads for numerous conversations to resolve the chaos of traditional group chats.
Telegram or WhatsApp group chats tend to be one-dimensional. Since every participant sends messages to a massive river, they can talk about politics, movies, and sports at the same time. Users can find the context for these topics in their style and identify the subject for each message.
Group Chat Features of the App
Wavelength emphasizes threads because of the abovementioned reasons. Accordingly, starting a group chat within the app and typing a message also means initiating the first thread. Wavelength ensures thread-creation for the group conversation regardless of the number of participants, allowing other users to respond to the created one or make a new one.
The new instant messaging app will show auto-generated and one-to-one ‘groups’ after you sign up with the service. These groups work with GPT 3.5 technology and have contacts already using Wavelength. Like other apps, users can join a group chat using a public link or when a friend adds them to a group.
Like WhatsApp or other instant messaging apps, you can download Wavelength and sign up for the service with a phone number. It means starting with the app may be a dream to come true unless you get an invite to some group chats or have friends using it. The app lacks an obvious mechanism for group discoveries, which calls for looking for the groups on Reddit or Twitter. You can also request friends to add you to the group or send you a group invite to join on the social networking platform.
Groups & Conversations
Wavelength displays the lists of groups and chats like an email inbox. It has a blue dot beside a thread or group when a user sends a message. You can access a preview of the latest messages related to each message thread after you have entered a group.
Mr. John Gruber, the advisor to Wavelength, suggested the said design philosophy for the app. Previously, the instant messaging platform would display a preview card for each thread.
Besides the chairman, Marc Bodnick, the core team behind Wavelength includes Richard Henry, the CEO, and Riley Patterson, the CTO of the company.
These individuals say telepaths had stopped growing, whereas others had moved to private conversations. Therefore, they shut the app down last year in August and initiated the process for Wavelength’s development.
Richard Henry told the media he had the idea of threaded private conversation when the team began working on Telepath. They used the thread for every kind of conversation in addition to naming the product and hiring their first software engineer. It happened when it was available for Marc only, and Henry was using the first Telepath prototype. The team thinks Wavelength is effective as a threaded private messaging app.
The Wavelength team decided to build private groups in Telepath – the social network app, as a feature. However, they believed in the unavoidable requirement of having much better end-to-end encryption and messages backed up on the device instead of the cloud. It convinced Richard Henry, Marc Bodnick, and Riley Patterson to make a new product now known as Wavelength.
