TigerText, a company that adds a bevy of privacy settings and controls to SMS, is today launching a new app for iOS that aims to preserve the social nature of group messaging while giving the sender complete control over their messages both in group and one-to-one conversations. A prized feature of TigerText’s service has been the fact that it allows a sender to recall a message they’ve sent at any time. Bad for TextsFromLastNight. Now, with its new iOS app, users can create and manage group messaging easily, recall messages, and control the lifespan of a message.
Other features of its new app include allowing the user to determine who receives the message, augmented privacy by using a TigerText specific user name (not based on a phone number), as well as confirmation of message delivery.
TigerText’s core belief is that social sharing should be possible without sacrificing privacy, and that individual control should be key to the text messaging experience. Today’s group messaging apps might lead one to believe that sending a message to a smaller set of people gives one added privacy, or that increased security comes by way of fortifying the message, or channels, in particular. TigerText, on the other hand, claims to be the first app to fully secure messages both in transit and in state, allowing the sender to be in control of how long a message lives — end to end.
In February, TigerText launched an enterprise version of its product, called TigerTextPRO, that enables companies to deploy their own private and secure mobile network in hours. Organizations can deploy a private, secure mobile network to allow employees to privately communicate on their existing mobile devices within a company.
As Leena Rao reported last year, TigerText’s mobile apps let users delete messages from both the sender and receiver’s phone by selecting a lifespan for the message, which ranges from 1 minute up to 30 days. What’s more, the messages are not stored on any internal TigerText servers, so they cannot be retrieved once they expire. Even James Bond likes the sound of that. Users can also select a “Delete on Read” option, meaning that the message will be deleted 60 seconds after the recipient opens the message. And users can message others on the platform no matter what device they use.
The new TigerText iOS app is compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPad and iPod Touch and is available free on the app store and at TigerText.com. The new app will be arriving for Android devices in the coming weeks, and previous versions of TigerText are available for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices.
The company, which is getting stiff competition from startups like Kik Messenger, raised $1.9 million in angel funding from Herb Madan and the co-founder of Akamai, Randall Kaplan back in September of last year.