There are plenty of choices when it comes to ways of collaborating with colleagues online, but new app Xros makes it easier to work with people outside your company while avoiding email.
Using a minimal but polished interface you can create private one-to-one or group chats that let you share text, images and file attachments from cloud services.
So far so unremarkable, but what’s impressive about Xros is how easy it is to bring someone into a chat without them having to download anything. Start a chat with anyone by entering their email address and they’ll get an email inviting them to click through to a Web app and take part in a chat right away.
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If they do decide to sign up and download a Xros app, chats they conducted beforehand are automatically imported. Apps are available for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows in addition to the Web.
Of course, you could just invite people outside your company as single channel guests in apps like Convo or Slack, but the ‘no sign-in or download required’ aspect here is compelling. If you deal with a lot of outside contractors and collaborators but don’t need the ‘paper trail’ that email affords, Xros is a far more lightweight alternative.
Xros was founded by Ami Ben-David, who previously co-founded the recently shuttered Android launcher EverythingMe. However, he departed EverythingMe and began work on Xros some time ago.
The messaging app and workspace collaboration app spaces are crowded; is there space for a service that fuses the two? If Xros can successfully play on the ease of access and use here, maybe it can carve out significant space for itself..
➤ Xros
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