Phone Janitor Version 1.4 Released

On: 2016-02-06 11:00:00

If I'm being honest, we released this two weeks ago, but kept it under the hood as we watched the impact of the bigger back-end changes in production. So it's improved things more than we expected, and you will love our plans from here.

Version 1.4 brings bigger changes on the backend than previous releases. Our biggest change users will enjoy is group calling/forwarding. If you have an incoming call, you can call a group of up to 3 people at once, and the first person that answers wins. This is useful if you want a call to ring to multiple cell phones, or your cell and your office, depending on where you are at the time. Text messages, however, have a functional limit of 10 people, so you can forward texts to multiple people. I personally use this to forward texts sent to my landline replacement (which we transferred to Phone Janitor), and it goes to both my wife and me.

We also added a lot of plumbing that our programming users can take advantage of, and we'll be adding to a new UI we're working on.

What's Next?

That's right, new UI. We've said before we're not designers, we just make a solid product. This is still true, but we've learned a lot and we know we can do better at iterating faster on the front-end. So we're taking what we have learned and rewriting things.

Why should you care? Well, the biggest problem we have for our own use is that we don't have a mobile app. Mobile apps take time, but if we want to engineer it right, we can develop and Android and iOS app in tandem with the new UI, and get a lot of functionality out at once. Want multiple custom greetings? A custom message when you drop a call? You'll be able to do that from your phone or tablet in addition to the web.

This means two things. First, we're switching telecoms. This is partly to address some issues with our current provider. We've always been small and been focusing on product while growing slowly. We're continuing this tradition, but we are big enough to afford a more expensive and more flexible provider, so we'll be switching that in the coming month or so. You won't even notice a change, you'll just be able to receive MMS messages and SMS from short codes (6 digit numbers). We'll announce it when we do, don't worry.

The second impact is aside from that update, we won't have a lot going on for a bit, so don't be surprised when we're hunched down at our computers for a while. You can always give us feedback, but we won't be talking so much. It's going to be even more fantastic and give you more control of your phone number.