Musical messages

MSTY is for anyone who has ever felt that pictures and text were not enough to convey their mood in a message. With its simple interface, it lets you add music clips from its large library to your messages and then send them to other users.

Musical madness

I don’t know how many messaging apps you are already using, but it is getting harder and harder to justify downloading a new one and putting time into convincing friends to do the same. But, that doesn’t stop MSTY being good. Starting it up, you can choose to set up an account or jump into making your first musical creation.

Three buttons let you move easily between the different options.

The first button allows you to select a song. This is defiantly the highlight – though it feels weird to pick it before an image. There is no real search function, which can be a pain. Instead, music is grouped into clearly marked collections, including Trending Songs, a Hot 30, Boy Bands, plus a selection of genres (rock) and moods (romance).

The selection of tracks is impressive and each plays for notably longer than I anticipated. Because of this, you can usually use something to fit your mood, even if it isn’t what you were anticipating. That said, The Jackson 5’s ABC seems to work with everything.

This again

After that your next job is to add an image. You can take a photo there and then, select from your gallery, or pick from preinstalled images – most of which you will recognize if you spent any time online in the last year.

Your final process in the creation of your message is to add the text. Unfortunately, this is a rather bland process, with your words locked in a single spot and the font unable to be changed in any way. White message on a white background? Perfect.

Once your message is done, you can preview and send it. All you have to do is pick a recipient from your contacts (it will ask to access them from your address book), and send. Notably though, you can’t send group messages, so for the moment at least all chats are one to one (at least as far as I can see).

Of course, if you haven’t created an account yet, you will have to – give them your number, they send you a text, and you are up and running.

Too too many

It was this final element of the process that cemented MSTY as just another messaging/chat app. While I knew this would be the case throughout – it was at this point that I released that I would probably never use it again after testing. It is worth a try if you constantly flip from one messaging app to the next – but it isn’t enough to pull me out of the Whatsapp ecosystem.