Why Policonvo has no server

There are two ways to build an app that shows nine messengers in one window, and the choice between them decides everything else about the product.

The bridge approach

You reimplement each service's protocol, or you run open-source bridges that do it for you, and everything lands in one unified inbox. This is how Beeper works. It is genuinely better as a product: one search box across every conversation, one thread list, one place to look.

It is also how you end up with a server. Bridges hold credentials or session tokens for every account, and they have to run somewhere. Either the user hosts them — which almost nobody will — or you do. The moment you do, you are storing the keys to other people's WhatsApp accounts.

That is a promise you cannot walk back. Not "we don't look at your messages" — you could, and the honest version of the sentence is "we choose not to".

What we built instead

Each service is its own official web app, loaded in an isolated browser session inside the window. WhatsApp Web is WhatsApp Web. You sign in on their page, to their servers, with their two-factor prompt.

Nothing is reverse engineered. No protocol is reimplemented. The app never sees a password, because the password never passes through anything we wrote.

The cost is real and worth stating: there is no unified inbox. Nine services means nine conversation lists. Cross-service search does not exist and cannot, because we have no copy of anything to search.

Why that trade

Three reasons, in the order they mattered.

It survives contact with the platforms. In December 2023 Apple shut down Beeper Mini within days. A container hosting an official web client is not doing anything the platform can object to — it is a browser with opinions.

It makes the privacy claim structural rather than a policy. "We don't store your messages" is a much weaker sentence when you have a server that could. Here there is nothing in the path. Not as a matter of policy, as a matter of architecture.

It cannot rot in the same way. When a service redesigns, their web app redesigns with it and ours keeps working. A bridge breaks on their next protocol change, silently, for everyone at once.

The part that is not free

Being honest about the downside: the app is nine Chromium sessions, and that costs memory. We put unused services to sleep and show what each one costs in the settings panel, because the alternative — hiding it — would just mean people discover it in Activity Monitor and trust the app less.

If you want a unified inbox, Policonvo is the wrong tool and Beeper is a good one. If you want the nine apps you already use, in one window, without handing anyone the keys, that is the thing this is.