GroupMe

Microsoft's own description of GroupMe is a single sentence, and it is worth reading closely: a free group messaging app, a simple way to stay in touch with friends and family, with public and closed group chats and private one-to-one messaging. It is the oldest product in this batch by a wide margin, first released in 2010, and it has been maintained rather than reinvented — it is owned by Microsoft and sold under a Skype entity, and it does not pretend to be new. The feature that made it distinctive is still the one that makes it distinctive: a group can include people who never install anything, because the conversation can run over text messages. The audiences it names are unglamorous and specific, the family, the roommates, the coworkers, the team, the band, the faith group, the vacation, and the discovery feature it does offer is aimed at schools rather than at strangers.

A phone number is required to create an account and cannot be shared between accounts, and the numbers a lot of people would reach for do not work: VoIP numbers, landlines, toll-free and premium-rate numbers are all refused. Groups are private by default in the sense that matters — you have to be invited, by a member or by a share link, and the help pages are candid that anyone holding the link can join, whether or not they belong. Opening a group up is a deliberate act with three settings: hidden, visible to a school, or visible to everyone and findable by name and location, and the search for those public groups requires location permission. A group holds up to 5,000 members, which the company says is its ceiling and also warns is unmanageable well before that, because GroupMe is reply-all and every reply notifies everyone — past about 200 people it says the noise becomes a problem. The SMS path is the legacy feature, and its limits are the honest part of the story: it works only in the United States, a newly added member receives just 12 messages before having to text a command to keep them coming, and direct messages are not available over SMS at all. Group calls are free and take up to 100 people, and the company says they are not recorded. Copilot now sits inside the app as well, and the company is careful about it: it can read only the messages a user chooses to send it, and a group owner can turn it off.

There is nothing to buy, and the company says so in unusually absolute terms: it does not charge for the service, which is completely free from its end. That makes this the only platform in this batch with no subscription and no paid tier to describe, which is a real difference rather than a small one. The nuance is minor but unacknowledged, and worth stating because no GroupMe page states it: the iOS listing sells emoji packs, priced from 99 cents to 1.99 dollars each, so the app does contain purchases even though the service does not. The costs that exist belong to the carriers, and they fall hardest on users outside the United States, because every group is given a US phone number and every message to or from it counts as an international text for anyone abroad.

GroupMe publishes no age requirement at all — not 13, not 16, not 18 — only a rule that a user must meet the minimum legal age where they live. It collects a birthday that cannot afterwards be changed, suspends accounts that fail the check, and explains the whole arrangement in regulatory terms rather than editorial ones, saying that the law requires a parent's authorisation where consent is needed to process a child's data. The most useful warning on the site concerns blocking, which does less than the word suggests: a blocked person can still send messages in a group you share with them, and the help page tells you to leave the group instead. Reporting hides the reporter's identity and covers messages, contacts and groups, and GroupMe publishes its own community guidelines for this product, with consequences running from restrictions on the account to losing access to it entirely. What is missing matters as much as what is there. No GroupMe page says anything about encryption, in transit or at rest, and the only claim on the subject anywhere is the data safety section of the Google Play listing, where the developer declares that data is encrypted in transit. Scanning of message content is likewise unmentioned by GroupMe, and is covered only by Microsoft's general terms, which say automated systems and people may review content to find spam, fraud and illegal material, and that Microsoft cannot monitor the whole service and does not try. The privacy policy is Microsoft's and never mentions GroupMe, and the company's absolute statement that it never shares personal information with others sits in the same app store listing as a disclosure that personal information and app activity are shared with third parties.

Groups who already know each other: a family, a team, a class, a club, a band, a congregation, a set of roommates, and above all groups with a member or two who do not carry a smartphone, which is what the text-message path exists for. It is not built for meeting anyone and says so through its defaults, since a new group is hidden unless its owner opens it and the one discovery feature is organised around schools. Anyone outside the United States should not count on the SMS half of the product, and anyone hoping to run a large public community will find both the ceiling and the reply-all design working against them.

The only platform in this batch with nothing to sell and the quietest about how it protects what people say. Free is the entire business model and the company states it without hedging, which after three reviews full of subscriptions and paywalls reads as a genuine difference; the costs that remain fall on carriers and on the edge cases, from emoji packs that no GroupMe page admits to, to international text rates for every user outside the United States. The safety picture has one hole worth repeating — a blocked person can still post in a shared group — and one silence worth noticing, because a messaging app that says nothing about encryption anywhere is telling you something by not saying it. What the product does have is a set of community guidelines written for this app rather than inherited wholesale, an appeal route, and a service that has been quietly maintained for 15 years without being rebuilt into something its users would not recognise.