Introducing RallyHub Messages: Arrange Hits Without Handing Out Your Number

Social tennis means arranging hits with people you do not know that well yet. Someone from the club ladder, a friend of a friend, a player you matched with last week. The old way to sort the details is to swap phone numbers, which means handing your number to a near-stranger before you have even hit a ball with them. RallyHub Messages exists so you never have to do that.

What it is

Messages is in-app direct messaging between RallyHub members. You can chat with any friend to sort a time, a court, who is bringing balls, all without either of you ever sharing a phone number or an email address. It lives in two places.

• The full page at /messages, with your whole conversation list and thread view.
• The mini-chat, a slide-out panel you can open from the nav bar on any page. Same conversations, without leaving whatever you were doing.

It does the things you would expect: replies, emoji reactions, editing a message, deleting a message, sharing an image, typing indicators, and pinning the important lines to the top of a conversation so the court address does not scroll away.

How it works day to day

1. Open /messages or tap the chat icon in the nav to slide out the mini-chat.
2. Pick a friend from the list.
3. Type, send, sort the hit. New messages arrive in real time, no refresh needed.
4. Pin the court name and time so it stays at the top of the thread.

Why we built it

The honest answer is that the phone number swap was the friction point. People are, rightly, careful about who gets their number. If arranging a hit with a new player means giving out personal contact details, a chunk of people will just not bother, and a hit that would have happened does not.

A second reason. A conversation that lives inside RallyHub stays attached to the tennis. It is next to the hit, next to the player's profile, next to your match history with them. It does not get lost in a phone full of group chats about everything else in your life.

About the encryption, told straight

This is the part we want to be completely honest about, because messaging features are easy to oversell.

Message text on RallyHub is encrypted at rest. The body of every message is stored in our database using AES-256 encryption. In plain terms: if someone got hold of a database backup, a database dump, or read-only access to the database, they could not read your conversations. That is a real and meaningful protection, and it is more than a lot of apps bother with.

Here is what it is not. It is not end-to-end encryption. Messages pass through our servers in readable form while they are being delivered, which means RallyHub staff with server access could technically read message content. This is not Signal. We are not going to pretend it is.

What we will tell you is how we treat that access. Technical access is not routine access. Staff would only ever look at message content for a serious reason: a valid legal request, a safety investigation into harassment or threats, or a fraud and abuse report. It is never done casually. And the practical advice that follows from all of this: use Messages to sort tennis, and do not send anything you would be uncomfortable with staff being able to see, like passwords or card numbers.

We could have written "fully encrypted, totally private" and most people would not have checked. We would rather tell you exactly what the protection is and exactly where it stops. You can read the same explanation any time from the lock icon next to the Messages heading.

The privacy choices we made

• Friends only. You can message friends, not the whole platform. No cold messages from strangers.
• Blocking is one tap and silent. Block someone and they can no longer message you, see your profile, or send you a connect request. They are not told.
• Ephemeral messages. Toggle a message to ephemeral and it is automatically hidden after 24 hours, for the things that do not need to stick around.
• No phone number required, ever. The entire feature exists so you can arrange tennis without handing out personal contact details.

How to use it tonight

1. Think of a friend you have been meaning to organise a hit with.
2. Open the mini-chat from the nav, or go to /messages.
3. Send them a time. Pin the court details once you have agreed.

One small ask

Messages only works if the people you want to talk tennis with are on RallyHub. If your regular hit partners are not here yet, drop us a message and we will sort them an invite.

Sort your tennis without giving your number to half the club. That is the whole idea.

Cheers, the RallyHub team

Quick context if you are new here: RallyHub is an Australian social tennis platform built by two brothers. Invite-only beta. More blog posts here.