Messages: the complete guide

The basics

Every conversation is between you and one friend. Only people you're friends with can message you, and blocking or unfriending someone stops messages both ways immediately; our servers refuse to carry them. Only you and your friend can read what you send.

Text, photos, and GIFs are free for every account. Voice messages, video messages, and albums need boopr+; more on that below.

Starting a conversation

1. Open the Messages tab

   It's where all your conversations live.

2. Tap the new conversation button and pick a friend

   The list is your friends, nobody else. Pick one and the chat opens.

3. Say something

   Type your message and send. That's it, you're talking.

You can also start from the other direction: on the Friends screen, open a friend and choose Message to jump straight into a chat with them. Either way you end up in the same conversation; there's only ever one per friend.

Photos and GIFs

Photos and GIFs are free for everyone. Tap the attach button in a chat and pick from your photo library.

• GIFs come from your photo library too. There's deliberately no GIF search: typing into one tells a third party what you're looking at, so boopr doesn't have one.
• One photo per message is free. Several photos in one message is an album, which is a boopr+ feature.

What needs boopr+

• Voice messages: say it out loud when typing isn't enough.
• Video messages: send a clip instead of a wall of text.
• Albums: several photos bundled into one message.

Everything else in this guide is free. For the full picture of what boopr+ covers across the app, see the boopr+ guide.

Disappearing messages

Any conversation can be set to clean up after itself. The timer is per conversation, so setting it in one chat changes nothing anywhere else.

1. Open the conversation

   The timer lives with the chat, not in your general settings.

2. Tap the timer button

   It's the little clock next to the message box.

3. Pick a timer

   Choose how long messages should stick around. Once a message has been seen and its time runs out, it deletes itself from the conversation.

Editing, reacting, and replying

Press and hold any message and the options appear:

• Edit a message you've sent, to fix the typo or finish the thought.
• React to a message, for the times an answer doesn't need words.
• Reply to a specific message. Your reply carries a small copy of the original, so a busy chat doesn't lose the thread.

Pinning and muting

Press and hold a conversation in your Messages list:

• Pin keeps that conversation at the top of the list, ahead of everything unpinned.
• Mute silences that conversation's notifications and badge. Messages still arrive; you just check in on your own schedule. Unmute the same way.

Muting a conversation isn't the same as muting a person. Muting a person, from the Friends screen, hides their posts from your feed and doesn't touch messages at all. The two switches don't overlap.

Deleting a conversation

Press and hold the conversation and choose Delete. That removes the conversation from your device. It doesn't unfriend anyone, and it doesn't reach into your friend's phone; their copy is theirs.

The related housekeeping, for completeness:

• Unfriending or blocking stops new messages both ways, immediately, but doesn't delete the history you already have.
• Deleting your account deletes your messages on both sides, from your friends' phones too.

Good to know

• Read receipts and typing indicators are toggles in Settings › Privacy. They're mutual: a friend sees yours only if you both have the toggle on.
• Notifications show nothing. The banner says "New message", with no text and no sender name.
• On a new phone, restoring with your recovery phrase brings back your conversations: the words right away, and photos, videos, and voice messages reload as you open them. Anything that expired or was deleted stays gone. The recovery guide has the details.

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