Openphone is Great

I’ve been using OpenPhone for some time now and am very happy. There have been issues from the start, but mostly they’ve been resolved over time and usually fairly quickly.

Hotkey’s should work in 2022

Except for a tiny annoying issue. Hotkeys.

Right now the Hotkeys for marking a message as read or archived is in my eyes broken. When you click on a message, automatically your cursor goes to the reply box which is totally fine and as expected.

However, this renders the hotkeys unavailable. If you press ‘e’ to mark your message as done, the letter ‘e’ will show up in the message reply box. This is what should happen since the focus is on the message reply box.

To utilize the ‘e’ mark as done hotkey, you must click off of the message reply box and then press ‘e’ for the hotkey to trigger.

🤯

If you have 12 messages that you want to mark as done, you must click on each message, click off the message reply box and press ‘e’. Which is totally inefficient.

I sent an email to Openphone about this issue, suggesting that the hotkeys should be set to use a key combination, versus a single key press. For instance, Superhuman uses “Ctrl key + another key” for some hotkeys. So I suggest this, and unfortunately, it was not taken into consideration.

After a couple of months, I sent another email. And still, nothing has changed.

Desktop Notifications

Unfortunately, there is also issues with Windows desktop notifications, that was an issue with another app called Rize. The Rize developers reached out to me and we hopped on Zoom to debug the issue. I showed them the issue, and they figured out a solution pretty quickly. Props to Rize.

The same issue occurs in Openphone, and I linked to the specific issue, and a resolution and the issue still remains.

Here is the Stackoverflow article that talks about the issue and the solution

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63933737/electron-app-not-showing-in-notification-settings

A couple of other issues

  • Google Contacts doesn’t sync automatically, and require a manual sync 🙁
  • Can’t use; for pauses to dial extensions.
  • No public roadmap or feature requests and voting system.

Openphone is Still a Great App

This is a rant, and the reality is that Openphone is a great app. These small issues are annoying, but not business impacting. However, I still believe the small things are what topple any endeavour. You can still focus on bigger goals, but a number of small annoyances can cause big grief with users.