Find it hard at times to stay on top of your iMessage and SMS influx because you’re just too damn popular? Or are you simply a notoriously slow responder that likes to wait until that red badge on iMessage has swollen to inordinate proportions?
Either way, Unreplied, a low-key app bundling iMessage chats in your Mac’s Menu Bar, vows to make your iMessage game faster and perhaps less flaky.
Unreplied’s main pitch is that it can be all too easy to overlook or forget an incoming (text) message when caught up in work on your Mac, which is why upon installation the app promotes an iMessage alert icon to your Menu Bar. The icon assembles unanswered texts and indicates the count of those in the form of either a black or red digit.
Not only does the elevation from the bottom Dock up to the top bar bolster both visibility and accessibility of iMessage, but more importantly Unreplied’s drop down menu lists every unread conversation chronologically, including message content and a time stamp. A click later, that is on the message of your choice, you find yourself in the automatically opened iMessage, ready to respond to the contact.
On that note, the app also comes with a litany of customizations and settings in relation to what message details should or should not be displayed, whose messages are to be reported in the Menu Bar and really everything else the user’s heart should desire.
As far as privacy concerns, Unreplied draws upon the macOS App Sandbox framework, translating into protected message data and perhaps more vitally barring the user from having to grant full file system or network access to the app.
On the flip side, the app’s arguably biggest shortcoming is its religious limitation to iMessage, a decision as incomprehensible as it seems wasteful: if the little icon on top of the screen was a more powerful hub for a multitude of communication platforms (perhaps including Mail, other Messengers), it could have been an absolute killer addition to your Mac experience. As it stands, Unreplied does pass the bar set by itself, though the lingering question ‘why set the bar so low?’ remains unresolved.
If you’re a little flimsy with your iMessages on Mac and believe that raising the service up to eye level could alleviate that, Unreplied is currently priced at $4.99.