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Comment by binkHN | Hacker News Reader

Hello hackers. I wrote the app and I hope it can help others like me.

I’m not very good at keeping in touch with friend and family. Also, my girlfriend likes little text messages here and there, and I’m not good at sending them. So “there’s an app for that,” right? No, there actually wasn’t. So I made one.

I define the app as a smart device automation tool for text messages, calls and email that’ll help you stay in touch.

The story on how the app got started, my eureka moments, repeated failures and a little technical detail is at https://medium.com/@mtc.dev/my-first-android-app-story-331c9....

I’d love some feedback.

Cheers.

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Very nice! Congrats on launching. Pro-tip: do not let others know you have or use this. In general people will instantly devalue your outreaches, even though rationally that makes zero sense. You still think and care about them, but in a way that’s… you.

Thank you! You might want to check out the story I wrote!

It is rational to devalue automatic communication. The birthday card you get from your dentist is not valued.

That said I have lost touch with a lot of friends I care about. The best friends are those you can pick back up without maintenance I think.

I second that, but follow up reminders and warnings if you are to eager are really helpful, so reframing this app as helper and let people manually edit the messages is much better. I think particularly sentiment analysis on incoming and outgoing messages would be really helpful for many people not so good at casual communication. Maybe the app should start sending automatically if you really cannot decide for an option in order to not let you think too long. I think particularly positive response reinforcement is needed if one manages to keep up communication in symmetrical fashion.

Please know, by default, the app will not take any action and largely act as a helpful reminder, and I highly recommend this type of use.

Right but the bday card from your dentist does not expect a subsequent back and forth.

Thank you for sharing! If you don’t mind - has anyone come back to you concerned about automated notes seeming disingenuous? (This could appear like a generic holiday card on what should be a more personal format) From you Medium post it clearly comes from the right place.

Also - if your girlfriend is ok with this, and encourages you to finish the project, she’s a keeper.

Yes! There are definitely those that don’t see eye to eye with me on this!

Just told my girlfriend your opinion of her ;) !

From personal experience, it will come off better if you ask her rather than wait for the other way around. Even though you’re an introvert!

Getting a 403 error i'm afraid. I'd love to check it out.

Strangely, refreshing the page after recieving the 403 gets me to the app store. But clicking the HN link always results in an inital 403:/

Thank you so much for this. I've been noodling building something like this for a while but never had the time. Already installed and set up my mom. <3

One question: for the days of the week icons, you have U - M - T - W - R - F - S

What are U and R?

U is Sunday and R is Thursday.

This is what I found: https://eventguide.com/topics/one_digit_day_abbreviations.ht...

I've never seen that in my life. Thanks for the info!

sUnday and thuRsday, to disambiguate them from Tuesday and Saturday.

Not a great disambiguation since satUrday also has a U.

I almost wrote a similar app (but in a much more limited version) to keep up with friends and family but, ironically, as an extrovert. I wanted to have their birthdays and the last time we spoke so I could keep up with them if our contact was slipping. Congrats on launching! I'll take a look at this to see if it fits my use case.

I keep wondering what will happen if your girlfriend realizes “the app is doing it” - maybe explain to her that it’s hard for you to send those little messages. I think she’ll then appreciate it even more when you do send them.

See my story I posted in the comment!

Hi i'am interested in a subscription model and if you have time an api to consume the data of the app like since how many time i've contacted someone. Add birthday etc ...

Thanks for your work :)

I will keep this in mind!

I was hoping for more technical detail other than it uses Kotlin. It'd be nice to know some of the under the hood details.

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