Hi, this is Dragoș, I am the indie developer behind KINN.
For the past few years I’ve been concerned with privacy, use of personal data by big corporations and manipulation on social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.
In 2018, I have made the conscious decision to completely remove most of my social media accounts (except Twitter). However, before actually doing it, I conducted a thorough analysis on my own use of those social media apps and discovered that for Facebook for instance, I was using it as a proxy to get in touch with friends and people I knew after seeing their posts on my timeline (thanks to the unknown algorithms), which might as well have been random for me. Another useful feature was knowing and being reminded about people’s birthdays.
With this in mind I’ve built KINN to do just that:
- Remind me to get in touch with people I care about from time to time in my favourites (which I assigned close friends and family)
- Suggest some some random people I wouldn’t think of reaching out to
- Surface birthdays in a timely manner and make it easier to keep track of them
And while I have met some of my needs, since launching the app it has become apparent that there was still space to turn it into a much better contacts manager. That is why I have been trying to improve on the Contacts app offering, with Groups management on iOS and the ability to easily delete multiple contacts at once.
Being concerned with the closed source code from the apps I mentioned in the beginning, I have made parts of KINN open source to improve on transparency here and here. I’m planning to make more of it open source with time.
I hope you enjoy KINN and its features. And if you have any feedback or feature requests, feel free to reach out!
KINN is a free Contacts Manager App for iOS and you can download it in the App Store.
