This is how your address book ‘Addappt’ed and evolved

Address books were our very first social network. Every time you needed to call someone, you would sift through the alphabetically-indexed pages of the book until you located the contact. Then came the digital address book, which never actually took off. With the advent of mobile phones and then smartphones, your contacts were literally at your fingertips. This has been the scenario for quite some time now and we are happy flicking our touchscreens. However, two guys – Mrinal Desai and Jorge Ferreira, want to take the address book to the next level.

Their startup, based in Silicon Valley, offers an address book app called Addappt. They describe it as a private, up-to-date address book maintained by your friends. Once you sign in and update your contact details, the app scans your contact list to look for people who are also using it. Once a match is discovered, it asks for permission to share contact details with each other. Every time you update your contact information, all your contacts using the app are also updated about the change, and vice versa.

Apart from its rich UI, the app also allows group management and group messaging via email and SMS. You can even email multiple pictures privately to a group (on iOS only, for now) – a feature that might come in handy when social media sharing is not an option. Users can also explore a feature called Tapp, where one can send 100 customizable characters and emojis with a single tap. It allows users to customize and create frequently-used notifications that can be sent to your friends with a single tap.

How Addappt adapted

Founded in 2012, Addappt started off as an address book app for iOS. Mrinal Desai, LinkedIn’s first business development manager, co-founded Addappt with Jorge Ferreira, a Microsoft veteran. Slowly their startup evolved to cover the Android platform as well. However, it’s still not available for Windows users. On being asked why, Desai stated that iOS and Android currently cover more than 95 percent of the market and it’s a startup with limited resources.

Earlier this week, the company released a big update for Android. With this new update, users will notice an entirely re-designed UI that enables faster navigation, a “Smart Favorite” feature that remembers the last mode of communication with favorited contacts, and more group support features.

Addappt is a bootstrapped pre-revenue company. The app is free to use. However, the startup does have plans for monetization, including premium features that will require in-app purchases.

Talking about the company’s expansion plans, Desai states, “Both Jorge and I are focused on an international presence. Besides English, we made Addappt available in over 11 major languages; including German, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Portuguese. The US is the biggest market and we find Asia – especially India – to be a growing market for us. We intend to focus more on those regions, going forward.”

How safe is this address book?

The company claims to take the utmost care to ensure that the contact details of the users are protected and they are shielded against spam attacks. Users choose the specific people with whom they would like to share their contact details with. For example, if you have 100 contacts on your phonebook and 60 of them are Addappt users, the app would ask for your permission to connect from the 60 friends who are also using it. An invite would be sent to your friend and only when both the parties accept, can you access each other’s contact details.

“We live by very high ethical standards. We do not store any user contacts on our servers and we absolutely do not trick our users into spamming their contacts,” Desai tells Tech in Asia.