Short · 2026-09-29
The live-typing London messenger that became Hiboo.
A London messaging app that showed friends each message as it was typed, relaunched by its three makers as Hiboo on Product Hunt in January 2016 and later marked as removed from the App Store by a user-edited directory.
Say Hi!'s card on Stompstart, saved in February 2016, promised "See what your friends type while they're typing!" The London app, marked public beta and tagged for students, teenagers and universities, let users "send what you type while you're typing," with "faster replies and hilarious messages guaranteed." "We're moving forward from static and synchronous messaging," it said.
BetaList had featured Say Hi! on 26 October 2015 as a UK app made by Matthieu Rigolot, Andrew Marin and Eleanor Harding, adding that users could pull invited friends into a chat with a shake of the phone.
Three months later the app had a new name. Hiboo appeared on Product Hunt with the same three makers, keeping the card's tagline; hunted.space dates that launch to 28 January 2016, when it finished 16th of the day with 95 upvotes. "No need to wait or no tap 'send' anymore," Rigolot wrote there, adding that a friend typing for five minutes only to say "I'm fine" was "very frustrating especially for young people."
An undated review on Startup Dope, written while an Android version was still planned for April 2016, said the team had built a new protocol from scratch to keep delays minimal and was aiming at students aged 13 to 25 in the UK and US. The founders expected around 50,000 users in the first month, it reported. The notes for The App Guy Podcast's 4 April 2016 episode with Rigolot, listed as chief executive and co-founder, described Hiboo as "currently in private beta and going into public beta very soon."
The Stompstart card still carried the Say Hi! name in July 2019. AlternativeTo, a directory its users edit, now lists Hiboo as discontinued with the note "The app has been removed from the appstore"; the entry was last updated in July 2023. No statement from the makers was found, and hiboo.co redirects to a page offering the domain for sale.