From calendars to the myriad of to-do list apps out there, there’s no shortage of tools to remind us to do things – whether that’s ‘buy milk’ or ‘call mom’.
Back in Touch for iPhone, however, is specifically aimed at those looking to remind themselves to stay in touch with friends, relatives or business acquaintances by letting them set reminders to call, text or email at set intervals.
How it works
Once you’ve given it permission to access your address book, you can flick through your contacts and click ‘More’ to access the reminder features.
The Reach Out Book contains a page for each contact, alongside stats for each person you’ve (not) contacted.
You can enter your own title for each reminder, but it defaults to ‘Back in Touch’. And you can then set the start date and intervals thereafter.
Back in Touch peruses your phone book and makes suggestions for you to reach out to friends and family who’ve been contacted least often, but you can disable this and manually create goals too.
While there are other similar apps out there, such as Luper, Back in Touch introduces a gamification element that actively challenges you to stay in touch with people rather than simply reminding you. For example, contact 5 friends in 5 days.
This may seem like a novelty inclusion, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll often have plans to call people – whether it’s mom or that old university friend – and never quite get around to it. Anything that proactively challenges you to stay in touch has to be a good thing.
Over and above the features, Back in Touch is a nicely designed app that does what it proclaims to do well. I can’t help but feel, however, that it would benefit from further integrations with email accounts and social networks, similar to Cobook, as this would go further towards justifying the $1.99 cost.
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