I have two stories to tell.

I am in a WhatsApp group with four of my friends. It’s a pretty active group with messages most days, and all of us tend to interact with the messages. It wasn’t until one of my friends in the group (who I am particularly close to) messaged me individually after about 3 months. I remember the feeling when he messaged me. I was shocked when I realised that despite being in ‘contact’ almost daily, I hadn’t connected with him as an individual for almost 3 months. It made me reflect on how my participation in the group had given me the illusion that I was connecting with him when in reality, I wasn’t. 

The second story is about a very dear friend of mine who recently had neurosurgery for a brain tumour. She told me in advance when her surgery was and somehow I remembered to message her the day before surgery to check in on her as well as the day after. Beyond that, I forgot in the maelstrom of life and when I remembered almost a week later, I felt extremely embarrassed and ashamed, and my shame bizarrely made me feel odd about reaching out again.

These events were two of the main reasons that I wanted to develop Bonds, as well as the fact that there are people that I forget to stay in touch with simply because they are not a part of my ‘active’ world. It is my hope, that Bonds will help you and me to overcome these problems and lead to a more authentically connected world.

Bonds does differ from other reminder apps, in the way that it seeks to reduce the barriers to maintaining meaningful communication. People lose touch with other people, usually because those other people no longer remain in their ‘active’ circles.

Most people would like to keep in touch, albeit it is forgetting about those individuals that is one of the problems. By scheduling a reminder, you can always keep those individuals with whom you have a meaningful relationship in your life.

Sometimes, however, we do remember someone and mentally make an intention to message them. The problem with this approach is that writing the message is an activity that requires thought. This means that it will be relegated to the back of your mind as your brain tries to process those things which hold a higher priority for you. This inevitably leads to an individual forgetting to message the other, until the next time they remember.

Having pre-set messages, be they bespoke to stock messages, allows a message to be ready at the point of notification, which can then be sent to the intended recipient with two taps of the screen (unless you want to edit your message before it is sent – which is completely fine).

Let’s look at this question another way. Think about how many people we would like to keep in touch with and we actually don’t. The purpose of Bonds is to make sure that we don’t lose those meaningful connections. The part of Bonds which is automated, is sending the notification and making a pre-written message available to minimise those barriers. The decision to send the message will always be a conscious decision by the sender. Arguably the benefits to humanity from having an increased number of touch bases would not only be beneficial for peoples’ mental health, but we know that physical health when people are unwell also improves from active concern and support.

Yes absolutely! Even after you have setup a notification schedule, you can easily go back into the notification and edit the periodicity as well as its frequency. You can also change the message from Bespoke to Stock and between any of the three messages for each.  

This is a good question! When ultimately we are sending reminders, why not just send reminders from one section and perhaps label them differently? Well, this was the discussion we had within the Bonds team. What we felt was that whilst the functionality wasn’t really any different, to get everyone to think that each area is important in its own right was the motivation behind doing it. Saying hello to friends is one thing, but consciously remembering the sick is another and then maintaining your ties of kinship is another. 

We gave this issue a lot of thought, of how to pick frequencies for reminders. One of the great strengths of Bonds is that we have tried to make connecting with people as easy as possible. Picking exact dates can take time and become another partial barrier to connecting. We wanted to make this process as easy as possible, so have adopted the scheduling system of picking a periodicity, followed by the frequency of that period, so if you pick ‘Weeks’ from the drop-down menu and the number three, this will schedule a notification to arrive once every three weeks. Of course, we are very open to user feedback, and if there is a huge demand for it, we will be happy to oblige 🙂

We do not want to give everything away at this point, but we are already considering some additions to Bonds, which will make the way that we connect even stronger. Keep a lookout for future ideas and releases!

None of the information within Bonds is shared with anyone else. The information is stored locally on your phone and notifications are set up locally. We may introduce a feature that allows you to back up your reminders to the cloud in the event that your app is deleted or should something happen to your phone, but even if we do, this will remain your choice and we will make it very clear exactly how the data will be stored. Even in a cloud storage option, we will never share your information with anyone else without your explicit consent.