We’ve updated our YouMail app for Android.

The coolest feature in this release is a YouMail widget.  This widget shows you how many “unread” voicemails you have, with an iPhone-like numeric badge, and tapping on it starts up the YouMail app.

It’s easy to use the widget. After updating:

  1. Tap and hold anywhere on your homescreen.
  2. Tap  “Apps and Widgets” under “Add to Home Screen”
  3. Find the YouMail widget and drag it to where you want it to go.

One note on the widget: it’s “unread” count is every unread message you have, except for messages in the “trash” folder. 

The widget wasn’t the only change.  There are also some other improvements:

  • Better notifications: the notification bar now includes the message count.
  • Easier “contacts” setup: now it’s easier to upload contacts and connect to Facebook for better caller ID and smarter greetings.    These are now in the top-level preferences menu.
  • Important fixes:  we’ve squashed quite a few user-reported bugs, we’ve made a number of performance improvements “under the hood”, and we’ve made a few UI improvements.

As usual, we’re already hard at work on the next update.