Serious group messaging with a fun side

GroupMe is a group instant-messaging app designed to keep you connected with the various cliques in your social circle. Owned by Microsoft, it’s built a deserved reputation as a solid way to chat with multiple groups of friends at once, keeping everything organized.

Just note that there is some extra work involved. Unlike Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, you must create dedicated groups for you and your friends to chat together and they all must download the app. Still, GroupMe stands out with its playful features, including numerous packs of emoji, a GIF search engine, and the ability to turn the images you share into your very own memes.

Getting started

After you download GroupMe, sign up for an account with your Facebook log-in or use a email and password. Next, you’ll need to enter your phone number, and then verify the number to complete the setup process. The app will send a text with a code to the number you provide and you’ll need to enter that code back into the app.

GroupMe keeps you and your friends connected (pictures)
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GroupMe asks for your phone number so it can verify your identity and help you find other friends who use the app. Using your phone number, GroupMe can also send you SMS messages from your groups if you don’t want to, or can’t use the app. In order to do that, you’ll need to head to GroupMe’s website and turn on SMS messaging. Then, you’ll get text messages of all the activity in each of your groups and you can text to reply.

After you set up your account, you can choose to have the app scan your phone’s address book to see if any of your contacts are already using GroupMe. You can also manually invite friends from your address book to sign up for the service.

Groups and chats

You can use GroupMe to send direct, one-on-one messages to your contacts, but the app is really designed around multiperson chats. In the app, you create personalized groups that you can invite others to join. You can add new members at any time, and share the group with any GroupMe member with a unique URL.

You’ll need to create a new group to start chatting by tapping the chat bubble icon at the top of the app and picking a name — such as co-workers or softball buddies. The name is required for you to create the group. Once you invite your GroupMe contacts to your new group, you can start chatting, sending messages, emoji, photos, and video. Each group in the app contains the entire history of messages sent by the group’s members.

The process to create a new group chat feels a bit tedious, especially compared with using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, where you can immediately start chatting with one of your contacts and then easily add more people to the conversation. I wish that GroupMe allowed me to add more people to a one-on-one chat, or at least let me create a new group chat without first picking a name.