addappt is an Android app put together by early employees from Microsoft as well as LinkedIn that aims to bring order to the chaos that is your contacts book. More than just yet another contact organizer, addappt ticks all the right boxes that you’d want it to, but it also allows users to express themselves with custom emoji, special fonts and more when their contacts have addappt installed as well. Addappt is unique in that nothing at all is stored on their servers, if you use Google contacts, things stay on Google’s servers, your extra info from addappt is kept on your phone, and nowhere else, and if you don’t use cloud services, the contacts on your phone will be used and they’ll stay put, too. addappt is a contacts app that doesn’t need to rely on any other service, and features full group support (something that Android Lollipop doesn’t), easier ways to communicate with your friends and express yourself. This latest version, version 2.0 has an all new interface and fresh features, so let’s take a look.
Downloading addappt on to your Android device is really quite easy, all you need to do is download it from the Play Store. Once you’ve downloaded it, addappt does a good job of giving you a tour of what it has to offer.
One important feature in this guided tour is that addappt doesn’t keep anything on their servers, which is a refreshing take on managing information. It’s not just your information either, it is totally up to you whether or not you want to invite your friends into addappt, nothing is sent without your permission and you’re not persuaded to, either.
Verifying your email is nice and simple, all you do is send an email to your address (you can add more than one later on with no issues) and enter the code when you get it.
When viewing a contact, you can quickly send messages from within addappt, or you can send what’s called a “tapp” which are quick notifications that go person-to-person over the web, but you’ll have to invite friends to take advantage of this neat feature. Having said that, you can take advantage of much of addappt without needing friends to have it installed.
Addappt has all sorts of cool settings in it, that allow you to create a unique look and feel for your contact on other peoples’ phones and you can use it to keep your life all together:
Connecting with a contact is super-easy with addappt, all you need to do is swipe and choose from one of the easily understood icons that really pop with this new white theme.
The same can be done here for groups, you just need to swipe and select an option. Android Lollipop doesn’t feature support for groups, and despite Google’s penchant for search, searching for contacts in addappt and creating a group is super-easy.
Sure enough, addappt painlessly set up a group SMS for the whole group, really quickly.
Favorites are a big part of addappt, specifically the way in which it learns which are your most spoken to contacts. You can of course add contacts manually without any questions as well.
Addappt is pretty good at letting you know when someone has sent you a message or connection, and the notification is nice and subtle.
addappt is packed full of features, which is perhaps its biggest problem. This can do so much for my address book, but ultimately it felt like a lot of the work had to be done by you, and for a number of things I was wondering exactly how to change things. Of course, there’s no denying that the new UI is good-looking, the white look and feel brings a bright change to our handsets, and everything is nice and fluid. I think the focus on the “tapp” notification is a little misguided, as it’s very rare to instantly get all of your friends or colleagues to swap over to another app, especially one that is ingrained into their daily usage. Still, it would be nice to see people adopt apps like these a little more often. I felt like addappt was another Android app to basically change the way my phone app looked, rather than doing anything revolutionary. Having said that, the group feature is excellent, and it’s actually led to bother creating groups to text and email, most of this is friends on the PS4 and word stuff, but it’s so, so much easier. Plus, the ability to use emoji outside of text messages and WhatsApps brings a smile to my face as well.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – As with other apps on Android, it runs well, and there’s nothing to complain about where performance is concerned.
- Features (4.5/5) – I feel like there needs to be a little more automation going on here, but on the whole there’s a lot to love about Addappt, and in the right hands I’m sure it will change how many people look at their address books. In particular how it speeds things up and makes connecting with groups much easier are key highlights.
- Theme (4/5) – The white theme won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it does brighten up having to organize things.
- Overall (4/5) – A solid, fresh approach to dealing with contacts, there’s a lot on offer from addappt. The fact that none of your information is stored elsewhere, and how it handles group contacts is pretty great.
Pros
- Allows the use of emoji to express yourself when calling or messaging friends.
- Creation, messaging and handling of groups is much better than most contacts apps, and will help keep things organized.
- White theme bucks a trend of dark colors and warm tones to help content and contacts stand out.
- Use of swiping and such helps to make addappt a very speedy app to make your way around.
Cons
- Tapp feature probably won’t be used by many, as it’s very difficult to convert people to your app of choice.
- Some features feel like they’re a little too much work than they’re worth.
Overall, addappt is an app that does live up to its promises, and it makes a stand by not sending your info anywhere, which is nice. However, it feels like there’s more automation needed with addappt as it can often feel like a lot of work to get most things done, but if you stick with it, you can get a lot out of addappt.