Alternative Messages App, and separating Messages/Calls/Music/Maps

Could the current Messages app be split into 4 apps, for each type of notification?

My big concern with this is that rather than pooling resources and making one good app, we just end up with loads of separate apps that are all broken in their own unique ways. For new users IMO it'll life very confusing and arguably worse than just having one sub-optimal app that works.

What specifically is it you want to change/fix? If I changed the messages app such that when it was going to display a plain message, it did something like:

if (file_exists("messages.custom.js")) require("messages.custom.js").show(msg);­
else original_message_display();

Then you'd be able to create a new app that overrode the default message display behaviour while the 'default' would still be an easily-installable single app.

But do you also want to change the way the message list works?

Because if so I think it's better to just make a whole new app. I doubt anybody is going to test what happens if you have your music app but someone else's messages and the default message list, and I imagine what we'll end up with is a bunch of apps that only work reliably if installed in the correct combination, which'll be a disaster for most users.

Right now I think android/iOS do depend on the messages app but actually making the change so they only depend on an app of type messages is pretty straightforward - basically what we now do for textinput with keyboard apps, or used to do for notifications on Bangle.js 1.