We have a new contact manager app officially launching on Christmas called Touch’d, and if the development team is to be believed, it’ll blow every contact manager out of the water.
Touch’d is unlike any contact manager we have used so far. At heart, it’s a relationship manager, or a CRM for your personal life. Its basic premise is to prevent relationships from decaying, and turning friends into strangers over time.
The app calculates your relationship health against your ‘favorites’, by looking at your interactions across phone calls, texts, WhatsApp conversations (WhatsApp Web conversations were apparently not being considered), Facebook, Twitter and email conversations.
You have to give the app access to your phone and text records (the development team reassured us that any call / text records never leave the phone, not even going to their own servers), and connect your social media accounts if you want to track them.
You start off by swiping through your friends list (Tinder-style), Right to add them as favorite and left to dismiss them, and selecting the frequency of follow-up reminders for the selected favorites.
After that, Touch’d takes over managing your relationships with them. It’ll even calculates the current health of your relationship with them on day 1, based on your previous interaction with them. At all times, it’ll display the last interaction time and method against each of our contacts!
However, the core interface between you and the app is when it notifies you when it’s been too long since you interacted with them, or it’s a particularly opportune moment to reach out to them (such as when they’re visiting from out of town).
What we were really excited about though, was a feature that’ll save you a ton of time and effort this holiday season: sending friends around the world (lots of them) season’s greetings with just a couple of taps!
We’ve tested this feature and it really seems like magic the first time. However, it’s a neat trick. Touch’d picks up the location of most of your friends through the formatting of their number stored on your address book, and if there’s a public holiday happening in any location around the world where you have friends, gives you a button to wish them all at once.
It even gives you a “I’m feeling lucky lazy” button that lets you cycle through curated greetings relevant to the public holiday (the team does have a subtle / naughty sense of humor. Their subscription page is titled “Make Touch’d great again by subscribing!”
Similarly, it lets you compose a “Howdy” text to one or more friends, using a nifty view that lets you select different openers, and shortcuts for inviting your friends for a cup of coffee this weekend, or lunch tomorrow, just by tapping a couple of buttons. It really needs to be used to appreciate how much of a time-saver this is.
As an app, Touch’d is well designed, although it’s unique aesthetics stand out in opposition of most apps following Google’s material design aesthetics, for better of worse. It’s easy to see the extreme level of detail that has been put into every aspect of the user experience. The developers claim they’ve perfected the user experience over three years, with over a year of public beta testing before deciding to launch it this Christmas, and it shows.
Some more impressive features are, however, reserved for premium users (starting at $2.99 a month). One of these includes the ability to set notes against users, and have them pop up just when you receive a call from them, or when you’re making a call to them. This can potentially save a LOT of awkward conversations (when you were supposed to do something but didn’t!) or give you good conversation-starting ideas related to the last topic you discussed.
Thankfully inviting your favorites to Touch’d lets you claim free access to Touch’d Premium features for a limited time.
Check out this video for more details:
The app is launching today. Do check it out and let us know your experience in the comments.
