Product Updates: October 2021

Simple is what we do best at Happyfeed so our goal this month was to continue to focus on improving the core functionality of our apps. This meant refining the photo experience and making sure Happyfeed looks amazing on any device: iPhone, Android, iPad, or even your new MacBook with the M1 chip.

iOS Updates

• 🌁 Blurry backdrops: Portrait photos are becoming much more common than landscape these days. To address that, we’ve updated the Moment screen to show your full portrait photos with a blurred background to fill the space.
• ✨ Full tiles: All new users (and some existing ones) will see larger tiles on the main upload screen in Happyfeed. This is meant to bring more attention to your daily post, particularly if you only record one each day.
• 💻 iPad and Apple silicon Mac: We’ve been doing a ton of work to improve the infrastructure of Happyfeed. One of these updates has made it vastly easier to make flexible layouts. That means Happyfeed looks great on everything from iPhone to iPad now!
• 🤳 Selfie Fixes: Some users reported that selfies were being distorted when saved. We rebuilt our image formatter from the ground up to properly handle all your beautiful future selfies.

Android Updates

• 📐 Image dimensions: All new photos will now be displayed in their natural ratios in your moment history. That means no more accidental heads cropped out of selfies and family pics.
• 📲 Memory reminders: New users will now be opted in to receive a daily notification at noon each day when they have memories from this day weeks, months, or years ago. The notifications should start after two weeks and you can toggle on memory notifications in your settings if you’ve been using Happyfeed for a bit longer.
• 🐛 Minor bug fixes and performance enhancements (because we’d really like to have 4.9 stars on both apps!)

Website Updates

Thankfully, our website is up and running on a new set of technologies after a complete rebuild from last month. It’s much faster to add features, fix old ones, and explore new ideas! Happyfeed is always mobile-first but the website provides a fun way to support the apps.

We left out a few pages during the rebuild, but everything should be back up and running with a few improvements.

• Inline photos: Photos now appear inline on the dashboard page. It’s nearly as good as the in-app experience now :)
• Uploading: The upload page back up with a minor design refresh. We squished a few little bugs while updating it too.

Coming Up

I’ve been wanting to venture into the world of Apple Watch development since it was first announced. For Thanksgiving, I thought it would be a fun project to launch an Apple Watch to pair with the iOS version of Happyfeed. We’ll keep it simple to start but it’s exciting to think of all the ways that we can extend the Happyfeed experience right from your wrist.

If you have any ideas or thoughts about what we should do next, send us an email at [email protected]. We read every message and often get our best ideas from the inbox.