Meet Toyo, an AI assistant that lives in your text messages and can call your phone. No new apps, no new tabs, just pure productivity.
As developers, our daily routine usually involves jumping between Slack, Jira, email inbox, and 50 open Chrome tabs until our RAM cries for mercy. Every time a new "productivity tool" comes out, we are forced to download another app, register another account, only to abandon it three days later.
Enter Toyo, a wild new AI assistant that just launched on Product Hunt with 253 upvotes. It promises to break this vicious cycle by living entirely inside your iMessage and literally calling your phone to chat about your tasks.
The creators of Toyo—Aidan Hornby and Tanner—admit they built this out of "AI psychosis." Instead of manually triaging emails and managing follow-ups, they built dozens of internal agents to automate the busywork. But they soon ended up spending all day just maintaining their complex agent stack. So, they packaged the best parts into Toyo.
Essentially, Toyo acts like a personal assistant you can chat with just like a coworker:
The pitch sounds fancy, but Product Hunt's crowd of cynical developers didn't let them off easily. Some tough questions were thrown right at the founders' faces:
The VIP Email Risk: One user asked a very practical question: "Since Toyo handles autonomous outbound emails, what guardrails are in place to prevent the AI from hallucinating and sending garbage to a VIP client? Is there a human-in-the-loop confirmation step?"
The iMessage API Mystery: Apple is notoriously strict about iMessage and does not offer an official public API for third-party bots. How did Toyo bypass this without getting banned?
Context Window Bloat: Another dev asked: Chatting for months in a single iMessage thread while fetching data from 1,000 tools must eat tokens for breakfast. How does the model keep track without forgetting older context?
Toyo teaches us a massive lesson about product distribution.
The hardest part of selling any AI tools or productivity assistants isn't building the coolest features—it's changing user behavior. Forcing someone to open a new tab or download an app creates friction. Toyo bypassed this entirely by piggybacking on iMessage, a UI people already check 50 times a day.
It's also hilarious that the founders built this because they were too lazy to read emails. Classic dev behavior: spending months building an automation system just to avoid 5 minutes of manual work! If you're an indie hacker, remember: Meet your users where they already are, don't force them to move into your house.
Check out the full launch and discussion here: Product Hunt - Toyo
