Comment by wil5for | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wil5for | Hacker News Reader

I recently developed my own app to solve the same problem, I call the Personal CRM a “PRM” (link here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14...)

The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users.

I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to user’s data - it stays completely within the Apple ecosystem.

I have also taken a mobile-first approach, I think that focus reduced some of the installation and maintenance barriers for users. With the iOS app there’s no deployment or setup cost for users. Personal interactions (chat) and data (contacts, calendars) are already managed through our phones, so the iOS app also seems to be a natural fit for other reasons.

I hope to see more products/projects where the users data, monetization, and developer incentives align. It’s great to see an open source PRM project that matches those incentives.

What are your thoughts on data interoperability? I have a few contact lists (names, emails, numbers, addresses across a few services) that I'd like to consolidate into a single list and take that into whatever app I end up using. Is this at all possible? Have you come across any useful standards?

Thank you for writing this. I’ve tried a few methods to keep track of important information about friends, and thought about writing exactly this - especially tracking contact frequency. I just installed Prim and I’m going to try it!

Feel free to try my iOS app. You can track the frequency. It's basically SwiftUI on top of SQLite. All data stays on the device. It has support for Siri, Shortcuts and widgets. Feedback is welcome.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1481868897

I tried the app, it crashes quite frequently, but seems like a very neat integration with iOS and I would consider using it if I could understand how data mobility is handled per my other comment.

Thanks!

Thanks for checking it out!

Are you using iOS 14? After the upgrade I’ve seen an increase in crashes for CloudKit storage. Hope to have a fix out soon.

I will follow up on the data mobility in your other comment.

14.1, but it seems to have stabilised and working well.

Comments so far:

1. I really enjoy the deep integration with iOS, I have not experienced an app that works in this way.

2. It would be great if the notes attached to a contact were saved in the iOS contacts notes, as from my testing this didn't seem to be the case.

3. I would like to be able to export all data into some format, and ideally import from a standard format as well.

Thank you for creating this, I've been using Notion which often feels too slow and separate from the flow of "keeping in touch".

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