Never miss a reply again with Unreplied, a Mac app that shows unanswered iMessages

Unreplied for macOS by Milan-born developer Andi Duro is a very useful Mac app designed to keep every Messages conversation you’ve forgotten to reply to in the macOS status bar, including iMessages and texts you have already opened but haven’t replied to yet.

The software originally released back in August 2017, receiving a couple of updates that year. Meanwhile, Andi has been working on a major rewrite of Unreplied for quite some time and now it’s finally been re-released on the Mac App Store publicly as Unreplied 2.

Here’s his pitch:

Have you ever forgotten to reply to someone? Opened the conversation and got distracted by something else, leaving that person waiting for hours, maybe even days before you got back to them? Of course you have. In fact, you probably have conversations like that RIGHT NOW. Hurry, go check! Or don’t: It’s 2020 and you better believe there’s finally an app for that.

The software supports both SMS and iMessage protocols.

Unreplied sits in your Mac’s menu bar, giving you an at-a-glance overview of all the messages you’ve received but haven’t gotten to responding to yet. Just highlight a desired message listed in the menu bar, then click it to open up the Messages app to that conversation.

Third-party apps are not permitted to access the Messages database in iCloud, but Unreplied checks periodically to see if you have any non-replied chats stored locally on the computer. This happens every five minutes by default, but you can optionally set it to check for messages every 30 or 60 minutes (unfortunately, you cannot make this delay shorter than five minutes).

To make sure that only the important messages get through, you can control Unreplied with an assortment of filtering options. For instance, you can choose to hide messages from specific people or numbers, hide short codes and unknown numbers (to keep non-replied spammy messages from appearing in Unreplied), sort messages by date, hide older messages, etc.

But what about security?

Glad you asked: the software takes advantage of sandboxing in macOS, a feature Apple designed to prevent other apps and services from accessing an app’s private space. According to the developer, the sandbox blocks network and file system access so that Unreplied can’t share your data even if it wanted to.

The app does not require network access at all in order to function. As a bonus, Unreplied also doesn’t need full file system access. Because it uses sandboxing, you must explicitly grant access to the Messages folder on your Mac by opening it before Unreplied can use it.

This only needs to be done once and privileges can be revoked at any time. If you optionally enable Contacts access, the app will be able to map phone numbers and email addresses it finds in the Messages app to corresponding entries in the Contacts app.

Last but not least, the app honors your system-wide Dark Mode settings in macOS and features periodic and daily reminder notifications. It even includes command line support which lets you do things such as export to CSV and much more.

Unreplied is a $2 download from the Mac App Store.

It contains no ads or in-app purchases.