September 18, 2026

Happy Friday Photon Community,

This week at Photon: Photon's App Funeral Developer Day welcoming 100+ developers, Product Launch week with Render's template, Vercel Eve, and Telnyx partnering interviews, along with annoncing the winners of our iMessage Agent Competition, with the Photon Community shipping more agents than ever!

Announcements

The App Funeral: Photon Developer Day Success

On Thursday, we gathered over 100 of the best iMessage agent founders and devtool builders in SF, with a completely full house, to mourn the App Era and celebrate what replaces it with Photon's upcoming Product launches.

• A successful night filled with a keynote by Photon's CEO, Daniel Tian, about Photon's growth since day 1 until now

• The Announcement of Photon's next channel integrations through one unified API with the beta access launch of Photon 2.0 to attendees

• Panels featuring developers from Stripe, OpenAI, Vercel, and Tinyfish, discussing the future of agent infrastructure and consumer apps with the best advice for building what comes next

• An actual app funeral with fun surprises throughout the night

Read Details

Announcements

Photon x Render: Codex Agent on iMessage

We teamed up with Render on an official template: Photon connects the messages, OpenAI Codex handles the work, Render keeps it running.

• Deploys a Node.js Photon runtime, Postgres-backed job queue (no lost messages on restart), and a 1 GB persistent disk for credentials and workspaces

• Owner-only authorization: only your phone number can talk to it, everyone else is rejected before processing

• Flow is deploy, open the dashboard, save your number, text your agent

Read Details

Announcements

Photon x Vercel Eve: Channel Integration

Your Eve agents can now chat with users on iMessage. Photon is officially a first-party channel for Vercel's agent framework, which means bringing an Eve agent to the conversations people are already having takes one command.

• Run eve add channel/photon-imessage and it provisions a Photon project, registers your number, and generates the scaffolding

• Each iMessage conversation keeps its own Eve session, so context carries across the whole thread

• Official webhooks generated through Vercel Connect as a first-party messaging channel

Read Details

Build On Photon

Photon x Muse: Muse in iMessage

Daniel published a walkthrough connecting Meta's new Muse assistant to iMessage using Photon, and made a bigger point about quicker one-prompt integrations.

• Full setup in about 30 seconds, no app install on either end

• Post crossed 17K views on X

Read Details

Build On Photon

iHermes: Hermes Agent + GBrain in iMessage

Dan Krieger launched a personal assistant built on Nous Research's Hermes Agent with GBrain for memory, and you talk to it entirely over iMessage through Photon.

• Persistent memory using GBrain for a larger context window using the Hermes x Photon iMessage integration

• Pairs with our Hermes integration docs and the "Hermes on Linux and Windows" blog post

Watch Demo

Community Highlights

Telnyx: Daniel Tian Interview

Telnyx, a Photon partner, published a customer story with Photon's founder, Daniel Tian, on why Photon exists: nobody wants to download another app to talk to an agent.

• Spectrum is now past 365,000 npm downloads a month

• Industry SMS is 90%+ outbound campaigns; Photon traffic runs close to one-to-one because agents hold real two-way conversations

• Daniel's advice on starting a company with conviction

Read Details

Community Highlights

Best iMessage Agent Contest Winners

Hundreds of submissions came in before the Sep 10 deadline, and on Saturday we announced the four winners of the most useful, creative, and viral demos.

• Best Use Case ($1,000, split): Dibs ($600), an AI marketplace inside iMessage that connects you with any buyer, and Adaam ($400), which runs trading agents, pulls research, sends alerts, and trades, all over text

• Most Creative ($1,000): House Force One, where you text your drone to check on the baby and get photos and flight updates back

• Funniest / Most Viral ($1,000): BailMeOut, an autonomous agent that rescues you from terrible dates and meetings

Read Details

That's all for this week.

We believe agents should reach everyone:
and we're building every day to make it happen.

Want to learn more about Photon?
Reply this email or grab time with us for a quick chat.

Photon is building the Twilio for AI agents - enabling agents to live inside existing messaging surfaces like iMessage, phone calls, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Slack, and more. Our open-source kits have driven 200k+ impressions and adoption from thousands of developers.

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