Product Updates: November 2021

With Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday season, November is always a good month for gratitude and a great time for us to make some big changes to Happyfeed. Most notably, we launched an Apple Watch app, but there have been plenty of other helpful update.

Overall

• 🙅‍♀️ Language filter in Random Pods: We added an automatic filter to look for inappropriate words in memories shared within Random Pods. Anytime we catch one, we’ll hide the post, remove that person from the Pod, and ban them from joining more. Happyfeed is a positive, supportive place and we have zero tolerance for misuse!
• ✨ Improving Random Pods: We’re in the process of reworking the way Random Pods filter out inactive members. Most likely, we’ll require members to share a memory every week or so to remain active.

iOS Updates

• ⌚️ Apple Watch app: Now you can enjoy a few of your favorite Happyfeed features right from your watch, like the Happiness Jar and mood tracking. Learn more.
• 📸 New photo storage: We realized that photos were using up a lot of data and taking up too much space on iOS, so we completely rewrote the code handling uploading and downloading. Now, Happyfeed only stores photo IDs from your Photo Library. It can display images without duplicating the data or needing a network connection.
• 🌙 Better dark mode: Until last month, Dark Mode in Happyfeed included everything except for the background colors on the upload screen. Now we have a unique dark gradient for each of the theme options. Don’t they look great?

Android Updates

• 👨‍🔧 Easier to join Pods: We fixed a few pesky bugs that caused issues when joining a Pod. It also wasn’t always clear to new Pod members how they could share memories. Now there’s a bit of help text right on the Pods screen.
• 🏁 Daily goal prompt: You’ve always had the option to update your minimum moments per day in settings, but now we explicitly ask all new users to set a daily goal. This means you’ll be able to track streaks and completed days whether you want to write three things a day or one.
• 📐 Big tile layout: For people who choose a 1-per-day goal, we redesigned the layout to show a larger tile and image. It takes much better advantage of the space!

Coming Up

The New Year is always a huge source of inspiration to help people get started with a gratitude habit. We can confidently say that it’s our most important time of year and the perfect time to discover the joy of journaling! However, so many people try to start healthy habits in January but find themselves losing interest or quitting within weeks. We have a some new ideas in the works to help with motivation.

We’ll also be cleaning up the annual Gratitude Grid for this year (one of my favorite things that we do). If you are new to Happyfeed this year, you can think of it as a larger version of the Joy Recaps aimed at a whole year rather than just a single month.