Jam Messenger Review

Some messaging services might try to cloud your judgement with emoticons, group messaging services, and long swathes of chat history. Others, like Jam Messenger, stick with the very basics and do a pretty good job of it - even though you might eventually find yourself feeling a little restricted.

A push notification based messaging service, Jam Messenger really doesn’t take long to set up. You enter a username, offer up your phone number so you can get a verification SMS, and away you go. It’s as simple as that and only takes a few seconds.

Such simplicity continues with how you send messages. Enter the username of who you want to send something to, type the message, and hit send. It couldn’t be simpler. The message is then received instantly by the other user. The recipient can then opt to either dismiss it entirely or reply instantly via a thumbs up or down symbol. That’s useful for answering quick questions, although you’ll have to create a whole new message if you want to use text to reply. That’s no great hardship but it does demonstrate some aesthetic limitations for Jam Messenger.

Rather importantly, because it’s all done via push notifications, once you’ve seen the message and opted to dismiss it or reply it vanishes and will never be seen again. Something that’s handy for the privacy-conscious amongst us. It also means that Jam Messenger remains a very lightweight app, and is ideal for those of us who don’t like to clutter their iPhones with much.

Jam Messenger won’t replace the likes of WhatsApp given its limitations, but as a very speedy solution to getting quick answers to things it works pretty well. For that reason alone it should appeal to some who like to avoid using conventional SMSes, or those who simply don’t want any messages retained.