iOS apps
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A new app called Garden helps you stay in touch with friends and family without Facebook
Facebook has become the de facto way people today keep up with their friends and family and, at times, their wider network of professional acquaintances and colleagues. But its inattention to user data protection is leading some people looking for an out. A new app called Garden, officially launching today, wants to offer people a more private and personal way to keep up with those who are important to them.
The app was created by Zander Adell, previously the CEO of the package delivery startup Doorman, which shut down last fall. Doorman had tried to solve the problem with last mile delivery by allowing people to schedule when their online orders were actually delivered. The business had taken a lot of work, as many startups do. And that distracted Adell from maintaining his other relationships.
“I built Garden because I lost a friend,” he says. “I got so busy running my last startup that I neglected some of my closest personal relationships with the assumption that we’d connect when life calmed down. Years went by and life never got any easier,” Adell admits.
He also believes that social media has tricked users into thinking they have stronger relationships with others than they really do – that “liking” a post is some sort of meaningful experience, for example, when it’s actually not.
“Maintaining a real personal or business relationship that adds value and meaning to your life takes regular and substantive effort,” Adell explains. “Just like you can’t expect the plants in a garden to stay healthy without regularly watering them, you shouldn’t expect your relationships to thrive without putting in the time.”
Garden initially grew out of Adell’s own efforts in better tending to his relationships which took the form of a big spreadsheet where he wrote down when he last caught up with someone. He found it helped him better keep up with both his business contacts and his personal relationships.
When he heard from others who had also built their own spreadsheets for a similar purpose, he thought it may make sense to offer the solution as an app instead.
With Garden, you set a reminder frequency on your contacts in your phone, and indicate how often you want to keep up with the person in question – weekly, monthly, quarterly, every six months, etc. When you do catch up with a friend, you can leave notes in the app and write details about your last conversation. In effect, it’s a personal CRM.
Of course, CRM-in-an-app has been done before, but the focus is almost always on business relationships – not personal ones. Garden could effectively manage both.
The app also plays in the same space as all those Address Book replacement apps once did, few of which have lasted. For example, Tinder bought Humin, Brewster’s team joined RBI, and Cobook sold to FullContact.
But perhaps now people will give new apps that help them maintain their relationships another look.
Garden is well-designed if fairly simple – it’s a contact manager with push notifications. The hard work of actually keeping up will have to be done by you – you can’t just like a few posts and call it day. But this may be what some people want right now as they wean themselves off Facebook.
Given that Garden is a database of your personal relationships, Adell says that data privacy is critical. The data itself is hosted with AWS in the cloud, and transferred securely, he says. It will also not spam your friends as many apps in the past have done, Adell promises.
That said, contacts apps have gotten themselves into trouble before – bugs exposed private information, and people have always been a bit uncomfortable in granting apps permission to their private contacts. Garden, like others, asks for access to your Contacts to do its work. And that will give some people pause.
Adell says the project is something he bootstrapped himself, but is his full-time focus for the time being.
The app is currently a free download on iOS, but may become ad-supported at a later date.
Image credit, top: Georgian Style Flower Garden by ricoeurian on Flickr; others: Garden
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App Store shrank for first time in 2017 thanks to crackdowns on spam, clones and more
The App Store shrank for the first time in 2017, according to a new report from Appfigures. The report found the App Store lost 5 percent of its total apps over the course of the year, dropping from 2.2 million published iOS apps in the beginning of the year to 2.1 million by year-end.
Google Play, meanwhile, grew in 2017 — it was up 30 percent to more than 3.6 million apps.
Appfigures speculated the changes had to do with a combination of factors, including stricter enforcement of Apple’s review guidelines, along with a technical change requiring app developers to update their apps to the 64-bit architecture.
Apple had also promised back in 2016 that it would clean up its iOS App Store by removing outdated, abandoned apps, including those that no longer met current guidelines or didn’t function as intended. That cleanup may have well stretched into 2017, as app store intelligence firms only started seeing the effects in late 2016. For example, there was a spike in app removals back in October 2016.
Then in 2017, Apple went after clones and spam apps on the App Store. Combined with those apps that weren’t 64-bit compatible and those that hadn’t been downloaded in years, the removals reached into the hundreds of thousands over a 12-month period. Apple later went after template-based apps, too, before dialing back its policies over concerns it was impacting small businesses’ ability to compete on the App Store.
To see the App Store shrink, given these clear-outs, isn’t necessarily surprising. However, Appfigures found that removals of existing apps weren’t the only cause. iOS developers weren’t releasing as many apps as they had during the growth years, it also claims.
Android developers launched 17 percent more apps in 2017 to reach 1.5 million total new releases. But iOS developers launched just 755,00 new apps — a 29 percent drop and the largest drop since 2008.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean developers weren’t creating as many iOS apps — it could mean that Apple’s review team has gotten tougher about how many apps it allows in. Thanks to the spam and clone app crackdown, fewer apps of questionable quality are being approved these days.
In addition, some portion of the new Android app releases during the year were iOS apps being ported to the Google Play platform. More than twice as many apps came to Android in 2017 than Android apps coming to iOS, the report said.
The full report also developed into the numbers of cross-platform apps (450,000 are on both stores), the most popular non-native tools (Cordova and Unity), the rise in native development, the countries shipping the most apps (U.S. followed by China) and the Play Store’s growth.
It can be viewed here.
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Burst breaks you out of your filter bubble on Reddit
One of the many accusations about the trouble with Facebook – amid its data privacy concerns and enabling of Russian trolls – is that it keeps people locked into echo chambers where access to other viewpoints are limited. This is a common problem across social media, people are beginning to realize. A new app called Burst is experimenting with how to break people out of their bubbles. But its focus is not on Facebook, as it turns out – it’s on Reddit.
In a way, Reddit has a problem with filter bubbles too, given that users choose which subreddits (communities) to subscribe to. That means than in addition to subscribing to something like r/politics, you may also subscribe to r/liberal or r/conservative, where you’ll hear your own viewpoints echoed and reinforced.
What Burst does is combine everyone’s comments and insights into one place. It works by finding everywhere a post has been re-shared across Reddit, then merges all the comments together.
The app is organized like Reddit itself with sections for Hot, Top, Rising, New and Controversial as well as access to your own subreddits when you sign in. To view the comments on a post, you swipe to the left. And to upvote or downvote, you use Force Touch.
Explains the app creator Alex Duckmanton, currently a product designer in Sydney, Burst has exposed him to different ideas.
“In my own use of Burst while testing, I’ve found that even though I see a lot more stuff I don’t agree with, seeing it helps me empathise with other perspectives. It’s my hope that this will help tone down some of the more toxic aspects of political discussion online,” he says.
While political discussions are often a hotbed for trolling and the general social media-induced lack of empathy, an app like Burst can help in other areas, too. For example, notes Duckmanton, a post about the new iPhone might appear in both r/iphone and r/android, in addition to r/apple or r/technology. This allows you to see a wider array of discussions about the iPhone news, than if you only read the comments from one community.
Duckmanton says he began to build Burst when he had some time off from work in the second-half of last year because he’s been concerned about the impact of filter bubbles on social media platforms.
“Filter bubbles aren’t being addressed in a meaningful way by any of the major social platforms,” he says. “The typical response of banning problem users or removing content is a brute-force approach and isn’t long-term or scalable. Outside of that, users are expected to self-manage the content they consume in order to have a more balanced view. It’s not reasonable to expect that of people, and it certainly won’t happen for people who aren’t already engaged in news and politics,” Duckmanton continues.
“We need to create products in such a way that filter bubbles cannot exist because their design fundamentally prevents them,”he adds.
The project is entirely self-funded and is currently supported by ads with the option to remove them via an in-app purchase.
Now that the app is out in the wild, Duckmanton says he’ll see how the community reacts before deciding if he will transition to working on Burst full-time. If it were to take off, however, he imagines a future where a Burst-like app could be built for other platforms – like Twitter. But in the immediate-term, nothing like that is in the works.
Burst is a free download for iOS. A link to sign up for an Android beta is here.
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Tinder begins testing its first video feature, Tinder Loops
Tinder is getting into video. On Wednesday, the popular dating app will begin testing its first video-based feature, Tinder Loops, with iOS users in Canada and Sweden. The company says it will evaluate how users respond to Loops before making a decision to roll it out to other markets.
As you may have guessed by the name – “Loops” – the feature isn’t focused on traditional video, but rather on a shorter, almost GIF-like looping video format that’s been popularized by apps like Instagram’s Boomerang and, before that, Twitter’s Vine. In Tinder’s case, Loops will be just two seconds long, and can be added to users’ profiles alongside their photos.
The company says it decided to test videos because it believes videos can show more of users’ personalities, and that can increase people’s chances of getting right-swiped (liked, that is). It suggests the videos could be used for showing off your favorite activities – like shooting hoops or cliff jumping. But it’s likely that Tinder users will find other use cases for looping videos beyond that.
Loops represents the next step in the evolution of our classic profile,” said Brian Norgard, Chief Product Officer at Tinder. “With the addition of video, users have a new way to express themselves while also gaining key insights into the lives of potential matches. Whether it’s dancing at a concert, doing cartwheels on the beach, or clinking glasses with friends, Loops makes profiles come alive. We anticipate Tinder Loops will lead to even more matches and conversations and look forward to seeing how our users creatively adopt the feature,” he added.
More realistically, looping videos may better show people as they are – not hidden behind a soft photo filter or snapped from a classic MySpace angle. And that could lead to less surprise on first dates, as people will have already gotten a better sense of who they’re meeting, as well as how they like to have fun.
But at only two-seconds long, Loops are not as intimidating as posting a “real” video for users who are more shy.
To try the new feature, iOS users in the supported markets will be able to go to their profile, then tap the “Add Media” button to upload a video. Once the video is selected, you can drag the time strip to select the part you want to loop, preview it, and post it to your profile.
Tinder Loops currently supports only videos or Live Photos imported from your iOS Camera Roll. It doesn’t allow users to capture Loops directly from the app.
Alongside the option to add Loops, a subset of users in the test markets will also be given the ability to upload nine photos (or Loops), instead of just six. That could encourage more uploads of Loops as users won’t have to remove their existing photos to give the feature a try.
Tinder would not be the first dating app to dabble with video.
Starting last year, a number of its rivals began to support video in various contexts, as well. Hinge started allowing users to add videos up to 30 seconds long to their profiles; Match and Bumble announced Stories-like features involving video (BumbleVID didn’t pan out); and Zoosk tried video in a separate app, Lively, which has since pivoted to trivia. Integrating video, it appears, is not that easy.
The feature’s launch comes at a time when the competition between modern dating apps has been heating up. Specifically, Tinder and Bumble’s battles have gotten nasty, with Tinder parent Match Group suing Bumble over patents, and Bumble suing Match Group back for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets. Tinder also recently said it would roll out a ladies-first option in its app, which is the thing Bumble is best known for.
Now, with Loops, Tinder is differentiating itself further from the rest of the pack. Whether or not users will respond, however, remains to be seen.
Loops is rolling out today to the supported test markets.
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Self-care startup Shine raises $5 million Series A
Shine, an early arrival in a market now teeming with self-care apps and services, has closed on $5 million in Series A funding, the company announced today, alongside the milestone of hitting 2 million active users. The round was led by existing investor by Comcast Ventures with betaworks, Felix Capital, The New York Times, Eniac Ventures, Female Founders Fund
and BBG Ventures also participating.
The investment comes roughly two years after Shine launched its free service, a messaging bot aimed at younger users that doles out life advice and positive reinforcement on a daily basis through SMS texts or Facebook’s Messenger.
At the time, the idea that self-help could be put into an app or bot-like format was still a relatively novel concept. But today, digital wellness has become far more common with apps for everything from meditation to self-help to talk therapy.
“We’re proud that we were part of the catalyst to make well-being as an industry something that is so much more top-of-mind. We really sensed where the world was going and we were ahead of it,” says co-founder Naomi Hirabayashi, who built Shine along with her former DoSomething.org co-worker Marah Lidey. The founders had wanted to offer others something akin to the personal support system they had with each other, as close friends.
“Marah and I are both women of color, and we created this company from a very non-traditional background from an entrepreneurship standpoint – we didn’t go to business school,” Hirabayashi explains. “We saw there was something missing in the market because wellbeing companies didn’t really reach us – they didn’t speak to us. We didn’t see people that looked like us. We didn’t feel like the way they shared content sounded like how we spoke about the different wellbeing issues in our lives,” she says.
The company’s free messaging product, Shine Text, was the result of their frustrations with existing products. It tackles a timely theme every day in areas like confidence, productivity, mental health, happiness and more. And it isn’t just some sort of life-affirming text – Shine converses with you on the topic at hand using research-backed materials to help you better understand the information. It’s also presented in a style that makes Shine feel more like a friend chatting with you.
The service has grown to 2 million users across 189 countries, despite not being localized in other languages. 88 percent of users are under the age of 35, and 70 percent are female.
Shine attempted to generate revenue in the past with a life-coaching subscription, but users wanted to talk to a real person and the subscription was fairly steep at $15.99 per week. That product never emerged from testing, and the founders now refer to it as an “experiment.”
The company gave subscriptions another shot this past December, with the launch of a freemium (free with paid upgrades) app on iOS. The new app offers meditations, affirmations, and something called “Shine Stories.”
The meditations are short audio tracks voiced by influencers that help you with various challenges. There are quick hit meditations for recentering and relaxing, those where you can focus on handling a specific situation – like toxic friendships or online dating – and seven-day challenges that deal with a particular issue like burnout or productivity.
Affirmations are quick pep talks and Shine Stories are slightly longer – around five minutes-long, and also voiced by influencers.
“The biggest thing is that we want to meet the user where they are – and we know people are on the go,” says Hirabayashi. “You can expect a lot more to come in the future around how we combine this really exciting time that’s happening for audio consumption and the hunger that there is for audio content that’s motivational and makes you feel better.”
Asked specifically if the company was considering a voice-first app, like an Alexa skill, or perhaps a more traditional podcast, Lidey said they weren’t yet sure, but didn’t plan on limiting the Shine Stories to a single platform indefinitely. But one thing they weren’t interested in doing in the near-term was introducing ads into Shine’s audio content.
The Shine app for iOS is a free download with some selection of its audio available to free users. Users can unlock the full library for $4.99 per month, billed as an annual subscription of $59.99, or $7.99 per month if paid monthly.
The founders declined to offer specifics on their conversions from free to paid members, but said it was “on par with industry standards.”
With the Series A now under its belt, Shine plans to double its 8-person team this year, launch the app on Android, continue to grow the business, including potentially launching new products.
Now the question is whether the millennials are actually so into self-care that they’ll pay. There are some signs that could be true – the top ten self-care apps pulled in $15 million last quarter, with meditation apps leading the way.
“We’re dominating the self-care routine of millennial women right now and we want to keep doing that,” Lidey says.
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Zoosk relaunches dating app Lively as a way to meet new people while playing trivia games
Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of trivia applications like HQ Trivia, dating app maker Zoosk has just released an experimental app that combines trivia with the potential for meeting someone new. The app is a relaunch and complete makeover of Zoosk’s Lively, which first debuted in July 2016 as a dating app that used video to tell stories, instead of static profile images.
The new version of Lively is nothing like its former namesake.
As Zoosk explains, the previous version of Lively’s group video chat app was fun, but people didn’t know how to connect and relate to one another using the video format. It felt awkward to start conversations, with no reason to be there besides wanting to date.
The company went back to the drawing board, so to speak, to think about what sort of experiences could bring people together. Trivia, naturally, came to mind.
Lively aims to reproduce the feeling that comes with competing at a bar trivia night. When you join, you’re placed in a group video chat team of two to four people. Together, the team works to answer a series of 12 questions while discussing the answers over video in real-time. When they finish the questions, they’ll be able to see how their scores compared with other teams.
The “dating” component to the app isn’t quite what you would expect. In fact, it’s less of a way to find a date for a night out, than it is to just make new friends. After the game wraps, you’ll have the option to continue chatting with the other players, if you choose. You can also add people as a friend, if you hit it off.
And when trivia isn’t in session – the games run twice daily at 3 PM and 7 PM PST – you can group video chat with others on Lively.
Because you’re not added to a team with nearby players, your ability to make friends who are also possible real-life dating prospects is decidedly limited. That’s something that Lively could change to support in time, if it’s able to grow its user base. But for now, it needs to match users with any live players in order to fill out its teams.
It’s understandable why it went this route, but it doesn’t lend itself well to meeting someone special – unless you’re open to meeting people anywhere (which some are), or are fine with just making new friends and seeing where that leads.
Unlike HQ Trivia, which features live streams with a host, Lively is just group video chat with a trivia component. That means it won’t be as challenging for Zoosk to operate, as it doesn’t have to worry with bandwidth issues and other costs of putting on a live game show. Also, because there are no prizes or payouts, you can join anytime during the 30-minute gaming session to be placed into a team and play along.
Lively is not the first app to support a group video chat interface where gameplay is an option. A number of video chat apps over the years have integrated games into their experience, including older apps like Tango or Google+ Hangouts, Line, and more recently, Facebook Messenger. But none have integrated games for the purpose of facilitating new relationships.
Zoosk today has 38 million members, but wanted to find a way to reach a younger demographic, which is why it originally launched Lively. The app was the first product to emerge from Zoosk’s in-house incubator, Zoosk Labs, where the company experiments with new ideas to expand its core business.
Whether or not Zoosk can turn trivia players into love connections remains to be seen, but it’s interesting how HQ Trivia’s success has led to this wider market full of knock-offs (e.g. Genius, Joyride, Cash Show, The Q, TopBuzz, Live Quiz, Live.me, Halftime Live!, Jam Music, etc.) and other tweaks that follow its idea of live trivia games.
Lively is available on iOS only for now.
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Air’s app lets you record high-quality home movies without running out of space
These days, home movies aren’t recorded with handheld video cameras, but rather with our smartphones. Unfortunately, there’s a downside. Our iPhones default to lower quality video so recordings won’t eat up storage space; and while you can adjust that all the way to 4K on newer devices, that would drastically increase your storage consumption. You’d soon receive… Read More
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The NYT debuts its first augmented reality-enhanced story on iOS
Apple’s investment in AR technologies has been ushering in a new wave of apps, from those that let you perform more practical tasks – like visualizing furniture placement in rooms – to those with mass consumer appeal – like AR gaming, including Niantic’s upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. But AR can also be used to create unique experiences within more… Read More
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Yahoo Finance launches social savings app Tanda, an alternative to credit cards
Yahoo Finance today launched a new app called Tanda that allows small groups of either five or nine people to save money together for short-term goals. The app uses the concept of a “money pool” – that is, everyone participating in one Tanda’s collaborative savings circles will pay a fixed amount to the group’s savings pot every month. And every month, one member… Read More
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App revenue climbed 35 percent to $60 billion in 2017
Global app revenue climbed 35 percent in 2017 to reach nearly $60 billion, according to a new report today from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which measured paid apps, subscriptions, and in-app purchases across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play. However, Apple is the one pulling in the most revenue, the report found – at nearly double that of Google Play.
Specifically… Read More
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