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.