YouMail's Blog

Our Android App Now Has A Widget

Sat, 18 May 2013 06:51:46 -0700

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:

Tap and hold anywhere on your homescreen.
Tap “Apps and Widgets” under “Add to Home Screen”
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.

Call Blocking

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:12:00 -0700

Most of us have annoying callers – whether they’re telemarketers, debt collectors, or even annoying exes. YouMail provides a simple way to block calls from these folks, forever, with just one tap, which we call “ditching”.

In our Android app:

tap on the unwanted caller in the messages or hangup tabs.
tap the circle-slash at the top of the screen.
confirm you want to ditch them.

In our iPhone app:

tap on the unwanted caller in the messages or hangup tabs
tab the menu button and tap ditch caller
confirm you want to ditch them.

From now on, when they try to call, they’ll hear “doo-doo-doo this number is out of service” and think that your phone is disconnected.

It often takes a few calls for people to get the point, but telemarketers will sooner or later take you off their list, and exes will probably try to stalk you instead by e-mail or on Facebook.

BTW – on Android phones, ditched callers go straight to voicemail, so your phone won’t even ring. On iPhones, your phone will still ring, so just decline the call – and trust us, after a few calls, they’ll get the point and be gone for good. (We’d like to suppress the rings, but Apple doesn’t let us lowly app makers have access to direct-to-voicemail functionality.)

Enjoy!

Voicemail to E-mail

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0700

We know lots of people live in their e-mail box.

If you’re one of them, you’ll be happy to know that YouMail can e-mail your mobile voicemail to you.

It’s easy to set up.

In our iPhone app, tap “More” and tap “Alert Settings” and just turn e-mail on.
In our Android app, tap menu, “Preferences”, “Notifications”, and then turn email on.
Or just go to the alert settings on our web site.

By default, in our free voicemail service, you simply click on the “play message” button to listen to the voicemail.

In our premium services (Personal Edition or Business Edition), you’re also e-mailed an MP3 or WAV file attachment. And in our Read-It service, we’ll even convert voicemail to text using our human operators, so you can read it instead of having to listen to it.

Voicemail to e-mail is a really simple feature – but extremely useful, especially if you want to manage all your communication from your e-mail box, whether on your computer, your tablet, or your phone.

We've Moved!

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:11:00 -0700

YouMail has a new location: 43 Corporate Park, Suite 200, Irvine, CA 92606.

This is a big change for us. Up until a few weeks ago, the entire YouMail team fit in a single executive suite across from the Orange County airport in Irvine.

An executive suite sounds glamorous, but it’s not. It’s really just month-to-month, small, inexpensive space.

What’s allowed us to move to better space? Don’t worry - it’s not price increase. Instead, it’s the real estate crash over the past few years made decent office space much, much cheaper - so cheap that now YouMail has a real office, in a decent building, with lots of space, at roughly the same price we were paying before.

Anyways, if you’re in the area and want to talk to us about your YouMail service, feel free to drop by.

By the way: if you’ve ever shopped for real estate, whether it’s to buy or lease, you know your phone goes absolutely crazy. We must have gotten hundreds of calls/voicemails from real estate agents and property managers during the brief time we were looking, which made us really glad all of us have YouMail on our phones.

How Does YouMail Actually Work

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:02:27 -0700

We get lots of questions about how YouMail works. At a high-level, it’s straightforward:

Without YouMail, if you don’t answer a call, your carrier forwards it to an access number, where their voicemail answers.
With YouMail, we have you set things up so your carrier forwards your missed calls to an access number we provide, and where YouMail answers.

This is done using a phone network feature called “conditional call forwarding” (CCF). Most people are aware that when you dial *72 followed by a number, all your calls go right to that number, without ever ringing your phone. CCF is similar, but rings your phone so you have a chance to answer, and then forwards the calls.

Different carriers use different codes to turn on CCF – but YouMail tries to figure out which carrier you’re on and provide the right code for you to dial. And you can go to your MyPhones page to see your code and the access number you’re using.

Not super complex, right? And for most people, everything works smoothly.

However, there are things that can go wrong, and when they do, it’ll seem like YouMail isn’t working or has a problem. However, it’s actually all about what’s happening at your carrier, before YouMail ever gets the call.

First off, carrier issues can lead to problems when you try to forward your phone to YouMail.

Prepaid Plans. A lot of carriers don’t let prepaid subscribers use CCF. Instead, you get funky error messages when you dial the special star code. There are exceptions, though. One of the best that supports YouMail is Red Pocket Mobile, who are definitely worth checking out.
Locals Only. Some carriers, like Cricket and Metro PCS, restrict forwarding to local numbers. YouMail’s has only a few, shared access numbers, outside of these carrier’s territories – so the conditional call forwarding will fail. The fix here is your own personal local access number, so the carrier will allow you to forward it.
Funky Phones. Some phones, like the Motorola Atrix, don’t let you dial a code to forward, and they instead require you to use menus on the phone instead

Then, once you have the phone forwarded to YouMail, there are a few things that can go wrong on the carrier side.

Misbehaving CCF. Sometimes CCF doesn’t work as advertised. Verizon users in some parts of the country, for example, have reported that *71, which is supposed to forward all missed calls, sometimes only forwards some of them. So if you’re on Verizon and you’re having problems, like hearing your voicemail isn’t set up, you’ll need to do the *90 and *92 codes as well, so that all your missed calls go to YouMail.
Getting Lost. When a missed call is forwarded from your carrier to YouMail, the carrier is supposed to provide us with your number – so we know how to answer the call and where to store the voicemail. But sometimes carriers lose that information – and then YouMail can’t find your mailbox. The fix here is to get your own personal access number , so YouMail knows any call forwarded to that number belongs to you, regardless of what happens with the carrier. (This is mostly a problem with Verizon in old Alltel areas, and with some of the smaller carriers.)
Dropped CCF. Carriers sometimes simply turn off your call forwarding settings. Then the calls go back to their voicemail until you redial the CCF codes. This seems to happen when they do maintenance on their switches or databases, and we agree that it is incredibly annoying. We’ve seen users report some success by calling their carrier and complaining – though we’re not sure what magic they’re doing.

The gist is, YouMail relies on your carrier to forward calls to us correctly. If it feels like YouMail is having problems, there’s a very good chance it’s a problem with your carrier. If you’re one of the unlucky ones with a carrier issue, treat this post as a troubleshooting guide to figure out what’s going wrong, fix it. and enjoy a very good, trouble-free YouMail experience.

YouMail for BlackBerry 10 - Sort Of

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:26:00 -0700

With a small team, we’ve had to focus on our iPhone and Android apps. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the cycles to work on a YouMail app for BlackBerry 10. Especially when BlackBerry 10 seems to have little traction in the US so far.

That said, little doesn’t mean none, and we’d been hoping that others could pick up the slack and provide a YouMail experience for the BlackBerry 10 audience. So we were really pleased to find out that the folks at AndroidBars did just that. They used BlackBerry’s porting tool to take our Visual Voicemail Plus app for Android and port it over.

It’s early, and we’ve only gotten a few reports so far, but it sounds like the port is working well, at least for the basics. So try it out on your BlackBerry 10 and give us and the AndroidBar team feedback on your experience.

YouMail for Windows 8

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:11:27 -0700

We’d love to have YouMail on every platform – so that every device, everywhere, has an optimized YouMail app for it.

But with a small team, we just can’t do it all. In fact, we have our hands full with our iPhone app and our Android app, and we had to drop support for BlackBerry

So we are always pleased when we see a talented developer use our api to produce a solid version of YouMail for another platform. The latest is MagikMail for Windows 8. Those of you with Windows Phones may recognize the name, as there have been MagikMail apps for those devices for some time.

We’re particularly pleased to see this come out for Windows 8, as Windows 8 is getting serious traction, and is now on roughly 4% of the PCs that surf the web, which is comparable to the number of iOS devices now out there. Anyways, download it and check it out - we think you’ll like it. We know we do.

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:52:01 -0700

YouMail has updated our terms of service, and we will be notifying all our users by e-mail over the next few days. These changes are designed to reflect how both the YouMail service and the law have changed over the past few years. We also wanted our terms to be as clear and readable as possible, even though there are lawyers and legal language involved.

Please read it carefully, as this stuff matters, and by continuing to use YouMail after April 15th, 2013, you are explicitly agreeing to these terms. If you don’t agree, just delete your account and don’t use YouMail any more. We’ll miss you, but we’ll understand.

We also wanted to highlight one really important change. We’ve clarified exactly what “inactive” means, since we automatically delete inactive accounts. Deleting an account means the voicemails, call history, greetings, contacts, and more, all disappear, forever.

Fortunately, to be “active” and keep your YouMail account, you need only do one of the following at least once every 90 days.

Use one of our apps, like our Android app or our iPhone app or third party apps like MagikMail.
Log on to our web site.
Actually get voicemails or missed calls, by having your phone forwarded to YouMail.
Pay for something.

Any account that is “inactive” based on this definition as of April 15th will be deleted and its contents removed.

The good news is that you can still get the YouMail service even if you are not wearing shoes or a shirt.

Smart Greetings Just Got Smarter

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:52:28 -0800

One of the most popular features on YouMail is our “Smart Greetings ®”.

Smart greetings greet incoming callers by name, like this:

Hi Mary, John can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message.

The idea was that smart greetings were:

Personal - letting callers know that you know who they are.
Easy - no need to record greetings in your own voice.

The way Smart Greetings work is this. YouMail actually has a professional voice talent recording first names, starting with the most popular. Then when an incoming call comes in, we use the phone number to figure out the caller’s name - not only looking in our user’s address book, but also in a variety of other databases. We then assemble and play the customized smart greeting for that caller, all of this in real-time before we answer the call!

Pretty cool. But we’re not resting on our laurels.

Over time we’ve had a lot of requests from “business” users to make our Smart Greetings even smarter.

So we’ve now created a “Business Smart Greeting ®”, which can provide our users’s first and last name and the company in the greeting, like this:

Hi Mary, you’ve reached John Smith of Coldwell Banker, who is unavailable. Please leave a message

To get this feature, just upgrade to our Business Edition. You then provide your full name and company name to be recorded (for which there is an additional one-time fee to get it recorded exactly how you want).

We’re not done with this feature yet, either - we’re working on some nice surprises we hope to get out over the next few months.

Voicemail To Text

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:45:57 -0800

Voicemail to text is a great time-saving feature, allowing people to simply read their voicemail. Assuming, however, it’s accurate.

As it turns out, how the message is transcribed can dramatically affect accuracy.

Machine transcriptions are low-cost and fast, but it’s hard to get great quality. They usually score somewhere in the 80% “correct” range, which doesn’t sound that bad until you realize that 75-85% accurate really means 15-25% wrong. Or put another way, expect about 1 in 5 words to be wrong. That tends to make messages very confusing, like these “bad” transcriptions cleverly set to music.

If you really want high accuracy, you need human operators to do the transcription. That’s what we’ve done with YouMail, and it generally gets us to 96-97% accuracy. That’s not perfect, but 1 wrong word out of every 32 is massively better than getting 1 wrong word out of every 5.

Of course, it’s not cheap, since human operators need to eat and pay rent. But it’s the only way to go if value your time and don’t want to have to listen to messages to figure out what they really said.

If you haven’t tried really high quality voicemail to text, try it here.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tell us what you think.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:27:00 -0800

We don’t take making major changes to our free YouMail service lightly.

However, we recently announced some changes that are making some of our users publicly unhappy.

These changes to the free service included things like:

No longer supporting SMS alerts in the free service
Only allowing a single line
Some additional advertising.

We’ve moved these features to a new premium service, YouMail Business Edition, that includes those features as well as some new ones:

Advanced e-mail alerts
Enhanced auto-replies
A huge mailbox,
And much more.

These changes are all about making the free service self-sustaining for our nearly 4 million free YouMail accounts. Simply put: that means making sure we cover our costs of offering it.

Take SMS. Sending SMS reliably costs real money, with those costs rising. And we’ve found that most of our users who use SMS don’t actually need it. Smart phones support push notifications or e-mail alerts, both of which we continue to offer for free. So these users still get notified, we don’t waste money, and we can invest in areas of the service that seriously need improvement. For those who need SMS, charging a price that covers the cost, and gives them a bunch of other features besides, seems fair.

Or take ads. It’s pretty hard to run a free service without some advertising baked into it - for example, have you used Pandora lately? But we’re not going overboard: no video ads, for example, but just a small banner in the apps and in the emails we send people.

We understand if some of our users aren’t happy with this and decide to explore alternatives. But the bottom line is that businesses need to cover their costs to stick around - and we’re no different.

America's Least Wanted

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:10:39 -0700

We recently added a “one-tap ditch” feature to our Android and iPhone apps. This feature lets users ditch a caller easily, where ditching a caller means that all calls from that caller go straight to voicemail and they hear “This number is out service” complete with the “doo-doo-doo” SIT tones. People ditch a caller because they don’t want calls from that number any more - and often, when the caller hears the SIT tones it takes them off of their calling lists.

We were looking for insights into how ditching was being used, which led us to pull the most ditched numbers to see just what was motivating our users to use this feature. Without further ado, here’s the “top 10” list for last week, which basically turns out to be debt collectors, and scammers pretending to be debt collectors.

336-856-2901 - NCC Debt Recovery
800-684-8429 - HSBC
972-378-3660 - Capital One Auto Finance
804 217 7156 - Capital One Collection
800 503 2463 - Fingerhut Credit
800 555 0433 - Fake Chase Scam
888 222 4227 - Drive Financial Collections
866 929 5307 - Fake Capital One Scam
866 929 5306 - Fake Capital One Scam
866 847 4958 - Fingerhut Collections

(BTW, the names in the list are what our community of users have decided is most appropriate for these callers.)

A number isn’t necessarily unwanted just because it makes lots of calls. We’re sure United Airlines calls an amazing number of people with flight alerts, and those folks are happy to hear from them. But for a number to make our top 10 list, it means it’s ditched a lot, which means not only is it making a lot of calls, but those calls are making people really unhappy.

We have over 60,000,000 calls/month coming to YouMail, and YouMail has ditched roughly 10,000,000 callers, so we think this sample is highly liked to be America’s least wanted callers - at least for this week.

Plastic Surgery

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 08:26:21 -0700

We have a new version of WhoAreYou, our Android caller id and call blocking app. It has several major changes, driven by your user feedback.

You told us that WhoAreYou’s design was “ugly”, “unpleasant”, “out of date”, and a host of more derogatory terms. So we gave it a complete facelift.
You had different viewpoints on how WhoAreYou’s caller ID popup should work. So we added two settings (accessible through the vertical dots on the title bar), where you can control how big it is (full size or mini) and when it appears (always, or just when the caller isn’t a contact). We also added a tab you can tap to expand/shrink it on any incoming call.
You told us you accidentally ditched your spouses, bosses, kids, clients, and more. Yikes. So we added a confirmation screen when ditching.
You told us to do better at identifying spammers. So we made it easy to check a box to report spammers when ditching a call. And we now use these reports to highlight spam callers - so as more people report spam, we get better at warning you about them.

And there’s also one new feature. We’ve added a “reply” button to send a quick txt message to your callers, right from WhoAreYou. It pops up a screen with default text (basically, “Busy, will call/txt later”), which you can edit and then send.

We’re listening - so please let us know what else we need to change in the app. Our scalpels are at the ready.

Really?

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:43:00 -0700

Like most app makers, YouMail takes app store reviews seriously. We read them all, every last one. Positive reviews tell us when we’re headed in the right direction, while negative reviews help us better understand where we need to improve. In fact, we actually discuss negative reviews daily. We try to contact those users to learn more about their problems. We try to replicate issues if we haven’t seen them before. And the problems highlighted by these negative reviews go on the top of our “todo” lists. Some spot-on negative reviews have even led directly to the whole team pulling multiple all-nighters to get an important issue addressed, and/or make major changes in how our app works.

Underlying all of that focus on reviews, though, is a simple assumption: the reviews are real - they come from real people, who really downloaded the app, really tried to use it, and then really had a good or bad experience they want to share.

Recently, however, we’ve been hit with a barrage of demonstrably fake reviews from another visual voice mail app marker. First, the positive reviews for the competitor, all glowing, and almost all done on June 14th.

Now the exact same set of people, on the exact same phones, a week later, reviewing YouMail’s latest release.

Why do we think they’re fake? Well, how often do people, who are completely happy with one app, jump on the competitor’s app with bad reviews a week later? And then on top of that, have one word reviews (“sucks” and “worst”) be highly rated in the “helpfulness” department?

It’s really a shame that a competitor feels they have to cheat to try to keep up - and blatantly violate Google Play’s commenting policies.

We think this sort of behavior needs to be called out, whenever and to whomever it occurs. And since we’re sure we’re not the only ones who see this, we think app stores need to help address this problem. We actually think there’s a simple solution - just allow an app-developer to comment underneath each review.

It would be easy to implement - with the developer account seeing an editable comment when it’s reading through reviews, and then storing and displaying these comments along with the reviews. (A more aggressive approach would also add how long the reviewer has had the app on their phone - so you could actually see who is downloading just to give negative reviews).

With that, users could easily decide which reviews are real - and make an informed choice. And the nonsense reviews we’re seeing would wind up mostly being a waste of time.

[Note: Shortly after posting this, we found that Google is already testing something along these lines with some Google Play developers! We can’t wait for it to go live.]

Oh, and by the way, we do see the REAL negative reviews about our current release, and we already have an update in QA, which should get posted on Friday or Monday at the latest to fix them!

This Time It's Personal

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 17:11:15 -0700

We’ve just done a major upgrade to our Android app, available at Google Play.

We’ve really focused on greetings - making it very easy to assign people personal greetings, and to easily use greetings created by the large YouMail community.

How easy? Let’s say your Mom calls and you want to give her a personal greeting.

You simply click on her picture, which takes you to a contact page.
You then click “menu”, and “change greeting” from that menu.
You now pick a greeting from the list (or hit “Menu” again and “New Greeting” to record a special greeting).

And if you want to change your greeting for everyone, just hit the greetings tab, pick the greeting you want, and hit the greeting.

We’ve made other changes as well - don’t be afraid to hit the menu button different screens to see what’s new!

And please - tell us what you think!

Thx For Calling

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:15:00 -0700

The great joy of doing a consumer-oriented start up is talking with users. That often leads to big improvements we never would have thought of.

The latest one of those is “voicemail receipts” – a smart version of the “reply by txt” feature found in many voicemail services.

The idea is pretty simple:

Someone leaves you a voicemail.
Your YouMail account replies to them on your behalf with a customized txt (like “Thx for calling - can’t respond until 5pm”) and a link to their voicemail and caller ID.
They can then play the voicemail to ensure it’s not garbled or confusing, share it (“Yes, dear, I did call the kid’s karate instructor - here’s a copy of the message I left”), and even update their caller ID for future calls, so you’ll know it’s them.

We thought this idea was really cool. But before rolling it out, we really wanted to know what users thought.

So we started testing in January to a steadily growing set of users. And we’ve gotten almost universally positive feedback, with many users telling us it should be the default YouMail behavior (as well as providing us a long list of ways to improve it). We also received great feedback from callers - with a huge number of them choosing to “Always get receipts”. In fact, our test was so positively received that the main complaints were users asking why their friends had them and they didn’t.

And the biggest surprise? We’re now seeing callers tweeting their receipts!

As a result, we’re now steadily rolling receipts out to all our YouMail users, and making it a default feature of YouMail. Of course, we’re also sending an e-mail to each user explaining it and providing an easy one click way to customize receipts or turn them off.

As you might imagine, even though our terms of service let us change YouMail from time to time, we’re pretty cautious about modifying the basic service (the behaviors users get by default).

Take “smart greetings”, for example, which greets callers by name. That’s now YouMail’s default greeting, but it wasn’t always that way. We started with them as an optional feature, but based on positive user feedback turned them on for everyone (after notifying our users). We had a few users who thought it violated their privacy since YouMail said their name, and left YouMail, even though they could turn it off any time and had full control. The lesson learned: you can’t please everyone. But it’s pretty clear that was the right decision, given that’s now one of our most popular features.

And so it goes with receipts. During testing, we’ve had a very small percentage of users asking us never to send receipts (a request that is easy to satisfy and we absolutely honor). But 99%+ of our users and their amazed and pleased callers have spoken: YouMail’s voicemail receipts have real value and should be the default.

So enjoy! And tell us what you think - we never know where the next great idea will come from.

Just the facts, Ma’am Last Friday we wrote a blog post that basically said this: as a small start...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:45:39 -0700

Just the facts, Ma’am

Last Friday we wrote a blog post that basically said this: as a small start up with limited resources we now had to focus solely on iPhone and Android, and we would no longer update our BlackBerry app unless BB10 was a huge hit. We said this was because BlackBerry was essentially irrelevant now in terms of YouMail signups (which we backed up with a “sign ups/day” chart that actually follows pretty closely the decline in US BlackBerry share documented elsewhere).

We did this simply because we wanted our users to understand what we were doing and why - and to let them know we actually spent a lot of time and money to really improve the YouMail BlackBerry app so it would be in really great shape for them. There was no dancing on RIM’s grave, and it was a really hard decision, especially given that our CTO and several board members are heavy BlackBerry users.

Our decision became big news, covered by CNN, Business Week, and even our local paper - the Los Angeles Times, among others. And lots of discussion on twitter and in comments on the various articles.

This surprised us, as Instagram just became a billion dollar company building solely on the iPhone, and the list of iPhone/Android only apps is in the hundreds of thousands. Plus, we’re US only and most of RIM’s success seems to be international, so we didn’t see ourselves as the canary in the coal mine.

But even more surprising was that, despite RIM having 40,000 plus developers and adding 50+ new developers every day, a senior RIM executive slammed us, basically saying we’re not getting new BlackBerry users because we’re in the wrong business, we should have pivoted to something else, and we should now “hang up our spurs”.

Well, we are firm believers that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. So here are the facts:

YouMail has over 2.5 million registered users, and we are organically growing now at over 10% each month.
We reach way over 15 million people every month - well over 7.5% of the US adult population interacts with us monthly in some form.
We have over 50 million calls/month hitting our platform (and we’re approaching having handled two billion calls since we started).
Less than 1% of our new accounts on a monthly basis are now on BlackBerries.

And here’s our opinion: we’re seeing this success because YouMail improves on visual voicemail in the same way Gmail improves on the e-mail client hardwired onto most smart phones. So there’s a big opportunity for us to improve life for a whole bunch of people. That’s means we’re not slinking off into the sunset. And with our ability now to focus more on iPhone and Android, we think our apps on those platforms are going to rapidly improve, and we’ll likely start growing even faster.

To everyone at RIM - no hard feelings. Seriously. You guys were hugely supportive in featuring us in App World and getting us going, and we still have quite a few BlackBerry users. And we really are rooting for you! So can we stay friends? After all, it’s not you, it’s us.

A short video explaining how YouMail meaningful extends and...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:28:58 -0700

A short video explaining how YouMail meaningful extends and improves on iPhone visual voice mail.

The Last Hurrah

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:31:25 -0700

We’ve just updated our BlackBerry app with some major improvements:

We’ve added the ability to ditch callers - where ditched callers hear a “number out of service” message and can’t leave a voicemail. It’s now very easy to get rid of telemarketers or ex’s.
We’ve completely rebuilt the app, so that it’s much more stable and the UI is much faster. We’d had a long list of known problems with how it was implemented and we’ve spent the past 3 months or so really cleaning things up.
Finally, we’ve removed ads from the app. So now not only is the app free, but it’s ad-free as well.

There’s also a ton of other bug fixes and more minor feature additions, and we’ve really focused on making contact uploading and updating work smoothly.

But it’s a bittersweet release for us. That’s because we are suspending doing any further work on our BlackBerry app, at least for now.

This was a tough decision, especially since the BlackBerry is what got us our first million registered users and put us on the map as a company. But over the past year we’ve seen our BlackBerry audience steadily shrink, with a steady exodus of those users moving to the iPhone and to Android (where fortunately, they’re tending to keep YouMail as their voicemail service). And we’ve also seen the number of BlackBerry users/day plummet while Android and iPhone users have soared - which is easy to see from this chart of our BlackBerry registrations/day since 1/1/2011.

It’s sad, but on many days we’re now getting fewer BB users than Windows Phone 7 users, and we don’t even have a Windows Phone 7 app!

So enjoy this release. If BlackBerry stages a comeback (and we’re definitely rooting for BB10 to take off!) or we can figure out how to drive a meaningful number of new BlackBerry users, we’ll be back.

But for now, this is the last hurrah.

A Really Major Android Update

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:15:35 -0800

Today, we just release a new version (2.5.9) of our Visual Voicemail Plus app, available to download here from the Android Market (er., Google Play).

There are a boatload of changes and improvements:

Completely new UI. Yeah, we know we’ve sort of sucked in terms of design. Not any more. Aside from being way better looking, folders are now organized by day, and they’re paginated, so the app starts up much, much faster and uses less data.
Completely reworked contacts. Your YouMail contacts now sync with the phone, and you can easily add/delete contacts, right from YouMail. Plus uploading contacts now is faster and more reliable.
One-Tap Searching. We know a lot of you have big voicemail boxes - and it was a pain to scroll to try to find a particular message. Now you can simply type the phone’s magnifying glass, type the first letters of what you’re looking for, and you’ll see the list of relevant messages. (If you have transcription, it will even search message content, not just the caller ID info.)
Easy Caller Ditching. Now you can tap “menu” and “ditch” on the viewing page for any voicemail or hangup (or on any contact) and that caller will no longer be able to leave you messages, your phone won’t ring when they call, and they will hear “This number is out of service”. No more telemarketers, debt collectors, and exes harrassing you. How cool is that?
Personal Greetings. Now you can select an individual greeting for any YouMail contact. Just click on the image when you see a message or hangup or contact - then click menu, and “change greeting”. This lets you select from any greeting you’ve recorded or grabbed from the community.

We actually did a whole bunch of other stuff too in this version. We reorganized and updated settings so they make more sense and so you can update your info easily on the phone. We really optimized how our data is stored internally, completely wiping what was there before so upgrading is much smoother. We’ve updated our polling so it’s more robust. And the list goes on and on - in fact, we honestly can’t even remember how many fixes we made this time.

We’ve been using various versions of this for months internally. We know it’s not perfect, and we have a long list of further improvements we’re already working on - but we think it’s ready for prime time and is a massive leap above what we had before.

Tell us what you think.