Addappt Android App Take Your Contacts to the Next Level
The biggest concern anyone should have with any app that accesses your contacts is
whether it stores them on external servers. Addappt prides itself on focusing
on your privacy. It doesn’t store contacts on its servers at all. Addappt is
not an app that backs up your contacts. They are still stored
on iCloud, Google, your device, or whichever service, if any, you use
to sync contacts. This app adds a lot of flourishes to your contacts and helps
you stay on top of changes in contact details.
Changes you make in Addappt — such as creating a new group,
updating contact information, and so on — immediately reflect in your phone's
address book. So why should you install Addappt? It’s because Addappt lets you
add other Addappt users as “connections”, and they can then choose to share
contact details with you. Without contacting them, you can see their date of
birth, phone numbers, email addresses, or even the time at their current
location (as long as they’ve specified their country/ city). When contacts who
are using Addappt change their phone numbers, or update any other contact data
that is shared with you, the contact's details are updated automatically on
your phone as well.
The app also automatically reminds you about birthdays and
anniversaries, fixes duplicates in your contacts, and allows you to request
your contacts for missing information, such as their work email address.
Addappt also has a one-tap messaging system in place, called Tapp messages,
which is the equivalent of emoting in games chat. It lets you send in template
messages such as “Super picture”, or emoji, with a single tap. This is a nice
way to quickly send a text and it allows you to type a 100 character message
too.
We checked out Addappt on iOS and found the app to be quite
useful. There are a lot of features in here that may not be apparent initially.
When you create a group, a carousel of profile pictures of the people in the
group appears at the top. This is one of the nice design touches in the app
that makes it much better than a bland contacts app.
The app also lets you quickly add people to a group via
keywords. So if you wanted to add a bunch of people who work at NDTV to a work
group, you could just search for “NDTV” and quickly add all contacts who have
that word in their name, or under the company name.
However, there are certain design elements that we feel
could be a lot better. The app uses tiny icons at the top for key actions, such
as creating new icons and adding them to a group. We feel that the size of
these icons should be bigger as they are hard to hit.
Some of the icons used in the app don’t necessarily
represent the actions you want to execute. For example, when you are inside a
group, you’ll see a pencil icon at the top. This is where you add more people
to the group. Initially we tapped the three dots icon and tapped the “Add”
button to add people to the group and this turned out to be the option to add a
new contact. Similarly, when you hit the Share button, it shows three tiny
icons for sharing options and that leaves a lot of empty screen space.
Having said that, Addappt makes good use of the swipe
gesture. Swiping towards the right on any contact reveals three options — call,
message, or send a Tapp message. Swiping towards the left reveals the favourite
and remind buttons. The remind feature is particularly useful — you can quickly
create a contact group for people you play cricket with, and the reminder can
serve as an alert for you to call them, or to leave home to make it on time.
These are just like regular reminders you can add with your calendar or a to-do
app, but Addappt makes it easily to add reminders associated with specific
contacts.
Another neat touch is that Addappt lets you share your
contact information with people who don’t use the app, via text message. When
we hit share, it directly opened the Messages app and let us share the contact
via email, SMS, or iMessage. However we feel that the app needs to add
support here for more apps, such as WhatsApp. Lots of people don’t even
check their text messages anymore, but are active on WhatsApp so that could be
more useful for them.
The good thing here is that in your own Addappt details, you
can tap a button next to each of your numbers, email addresses, or other contact
information, to make it private. When you share your contact details with
others, details you marked as private don’t get shared.
Addappt is a nice app that blends in seamlessly with the
stock contacts app on your smartphone. Its focus on privacy and rich contact
cards are pretty good and these things make us recommend the app. At the moment
it is totally free on both Android and iOS but Addappt plans to
charge people for some of these features from 2018. If you sign up before that,
you can continue to use the app for free
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