Spurred on by the intense popularity of Snapchat, it seems like everyone’s making an app with self-destructing messages these days. Or if you’re not making a standalone messaging app, you’re adding messaging as part of your existing service. With $6 million in backing by South Korea’s SK Planet, Frankly is another recent entrant into the space.
And how is Frankly trying to be different? Well, with its latest update, the app allows users to have more control over how their text appears, including the size and background color.
Frankly, in case you didn’t know, is an ephemeral messaging app that allows users to send text messages to one another that disappear after 10 seconds. While apps like Snapchat allow photos or videos to be shared, Frankly is mostly about the kind of short messages you used to send via SMS — that is, before exploding messages were a thing.
But even if you add the ephemeral element, text messaging hasn’t changed much over the years, and users don’t have a lot of ways to get their feelings across. For the most part, the alphabet and font that they use hasn’t changed very much over the years. And while emoticons, Emoji, and even stickers have been used in varying degrees to better communicate emotions with one another, they’re often insufficient.
That’s the main impetus behind the latest update to Frankly. According to Frankly CEO Steve Chung, the team wanted to provide a “full set of tools to communicate with your emotions via text.”
That starts with enabling users to play with the sizing of the text. To do so, you simply pinch to minimize or maximize the text before you send it. As Chung explains, that lets its users differentiate what’s meant to be a shout from what’s meant to be a whisper.
You can also change the background color of the text, you know to convey anger (red) or sadness (blue) or whatever other emotions you might have as a human. To do so, simply move your finger across the text field and it’ll automatically change.
Anyway, so Frankly has a team of about 20 that is funded thanks to SK Planet, which has put $6 million into the company. Considering the size of the messaging market in general and the opportunity there, it’s a pretty modest bet for the Korean investor.