Revere’s approach to contact importing
Full contact importing is coming to Revere soon. This has been a feature long needed, and with the recent rebuilding of the app is now possible. There are some things I believe are important when it comes to the future like this and I wanted to share those thoughts.
Many apps indiscriminately collect your entire contact list to use it for growth and marketing. This isn't necessary for Revere, nor is it anything people want, so instead of treating contacts as data to be harvested, Revere will keep them private.
There are two goals for the full contact import feature:
Keeping contact details like emails, phone numbers, etc. only on your device, not in the cloud.
Showing only contacts you have added notes for, rather than every person imported, maintaining a clean, simple, and focused interface.
On-device privacy
Revere’s business approach is straightforward: build something useful, with a sustainable business model, so it can be around for a long time <insert link to forever app>. Revere has no investors pressuring it and isn’t aiming to be the next tech giant, so there’s no reason to seize on every way to monetize people’s information.
Moreover, storing personal information is a serious responsibility and liability worth minimizing. The best way to protect sensitive information is to not have it in the first place.
Uncluttered and simple
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” ~ Blaise Pascal
For a long time, I resisted implementing full contact importing because I didn't want to clutter the interface with hundreds of people, most of whom you’ll probably never add a note for.
Building something simple is paradoxically complex. It demands more deliberate choices, thinking farther ahead, more effort, and ultimately more time than what is often the faster route.
The simplest implementation of contact importing would be to just add everyone to your account, but that creates clutter and make Revere more like a contact manager, which it is not.
After a long time thinking about it, I believe I found an approach that lets people use their contacts (reducing the manual work of adding people) while still keeping the focus on the handful of people you have notes for.
(As a sidenote, this will also enable starting messages and calls from Revere.)
What’s next
Revere v4.4 (already released) contains the first contact importing functionality. While it’s currently limited to importing contacts one-at-a-time, it establishes the foundations to build on. The full contact import project is already underway but I'll save sharing any specifics for the future, since things can change as you get into the details.
Finally, this project represents a significant milestone in Revere's history. Not only is it a very important feature to help grow the app, but it represents staying true to the app’s core principles.
