Saropa Contacts March 2024 Newsletter
It was busy launch month for the team at Saropa Contacts. Fixing bugs, adding features, supporting new users, and planning for the future. Read below about what we’ve been working on and the changes we have made to Saropa Contacts, and let us know your ideas for the future!
Going Global
By the end of our first full month, Saropa Contacts was being uses in 80 countries and over 2,000 users. We are humbled and grateful for this early success!
World Exploration
Addressing a few unexpected hiccups, our recent update enhances the app’s stability and your ease of use.
— We now show the address as it is being located on the map
— Added a white outline to make it contacts clearer, and resolved an issue where people at the same address were duplicated
- You can now override your location by clicking on the mark marker
- User preferences (settings) were being lost between app upgrades
The Indian Subcontinent
We’re pleased to roll out new enhancements that will make your experience with our app even better.
- Extended world data for India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Important persons, inspiration quotes, religious holidays, and other country facts.
- Capital cities now show the geographic hemisphere
- Royals are now available in the Interesting Persons
- Cultural symbology and notes are now shown for most countries
Anonymous Browsing
We're continuously working on quality assurance tools and privacy tools — especially useful when sharing screenshots that may otherwise contain real names, contact details and photos:
Contact Levelling Up
- Saropa System Contact — all you need to know about us in the app. Can be turned off in the user preferences.
- Showing the family contact details and other relationships when viewing a contact and their map. For example, showing the parents address for children and spouses within a family.
- Optionally show helpful hints when calling emergency services
- Now detecting SMS-Only emergency numbers, and we use the device texting function instead of the phone call function
- Added wait and pause codes to the phone dialer. Also added an editor — something that is unavailable in the stock dialers we tested on.
Academic Success
- Detecting academic email addresses for automatic industry grouping
- Added student discounts, so if you have a dot edu email address then sign up for free on our upgrade page
Chinese Year of the Dragon
The Chinese New Year and zodiac horoscopes are celebrated worldwide, reflecting a rich cultural heritage that influences traditions and festivities.
- The event calendar now optionally shows both the Lunar New Year, and zodiac transitions throughout the year
- Sun and moon phase tooltips have been enhanced when tapping on “Today”
- Reminders are now visible on home screen by default
- Dynamic Reminders can be enabled for upcoming birthdays and anniversaries
Online Enhancements
- Website previews — look before you leap! With previews, you can now see what’s behind those link you have stored for your contacts.
Star Search
- This year’s Oscar winners were added to our stock Interesting Persons lists. Congratulations to Cillian Murphy and Emma Stone, both of whom you can now add to your own personal contact list.
— A discovery quiz was added to the homepage to help you find interesting people you might like to follow
- Location tracked type activities — opting-in to contact tracking will build a useful map of where you phoned, messaged, or otherwise interacted with your contacts
Intelligent Integrations
- Added an option for users to anonymously send us their app usage telemetry using Google’s Firebase events
Known Issues
We’re actively working to resolve the remaining issues and will have updates soon.
- Nicknames on some devices are not importing correctly
- Fonts sizes are too small on some screens with taller aspect ratios
- Direct calling may fail with 3rd party dialers
User Feedback
We’re dedicated to supporting our users and are eager to hear how we can make your experience even better. We received 1,000 installations by the 3rd week of launch, and it was enough to overwhelm our support emails.
- Everybody gets the pro trial by default — with a special promo code added for free Pro access
- Added a feedback survey using Google Forms https://forms.gle/4EwvdAHekFj4TG8X6
Ads & Landing Pages
Creating compelling ad copy and visuals is key to welcoming new users to our app, and we’re putting great care into this effort.
- Added a 15-second intro short (in 3 aspect rations) to the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@saropa/videos
- Put some notices and tidied up the Saropa Contacts Facebook page
- App store screen were updated — not great but an improvement
Coming Soon
Exciting new features are on their way to improve your experience with Saropa Contacts.
- Build your connections with an online network
- Privacy mode for hiding contact details when in public
- World book development focus on Nigeria, South Africa and Algeria
- Integration with Facebook friends, X (formerly known as Twitter) feeds, and YouTube videos
- Feature showcases, start-up guides, know-your-contact quizzes
- Notifications — phone events from the smart events
- Social communities on the big networks Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn
- Support for tablets and screen rotation (landscape mode)
Developer Community
- Launched an open source project and began code migration https://pub.dev/packages/saropa_dart_utils read the launch notes on LinkedIn
- Some of our favorite packages have issues, and we engaged with the developers to see if they can upstream our suggestions
What’s On Our Minds
- Pro upgrades… “Putting cool stuff behind a paywall slows growth”
- AI is a gift for adding color — but quality and consistency is a challenge
- Cracking the gig economy —how to find (and promote) the stunningly fast and brilliant from the enthusiastically… bad
- Understanding CPI/CPC and generally advertising in the Apple ecosystem
- Spending too much time fighting the development environment, deprecated packages and undocumented errors
- Coding is easier with Flowbender
A Final Word
Your feedback is essential to us, and we genuinely value your support. If you haven’t done so already, discover the ease of managing your connections with Saropa Contacts — download now for a smarter way to stay in touch.
Editors Footnotes
- To attach a link to a Medium image, select it and CTRL-K to paste a URL
- How does Medium not have a spell checker or image cropper?
