Wouldn’t it be simple to realise that most of the privacy and stalking issues that most of us face wouldn’t have been possible without social networks wanting to announce what you were doing, where you are, who you’re with and keeping track of basically everything you do.
Count it as one of the man made disasters, that cause severe anxiety and security issues. A new messenger app is getting attention on kickstarter for trying to help solve that.
Yofam, a product that was born out of necessity to provide a safe way to message your friend, family and then your annoying friends who bother you without getting giving out details of your seen / read activity.
Adel Melanin, Founder / CEO of Yofam, who was fed up with the ways that most messengers were using people’s data in the name of providing personalization were actually intruding into your private life, giving access to information to a huge base of advertisers and services. Yofam is a chat messenger born as an alternative to the invasive messenger apps we currently use. It’s designed for people who love to be social and independent, for people who enjoy hanging out with friends and family, but also need to be left in peace without getting notified / disturbed when they want to unwind.
With Yofam Messenger you can text, chat, share media, voice notes and videos with a set of specific friends, while maintaining your privacy.
Adel says, “Yofam Messenger was born out of love for privacy as online and/or indicators of read messages have always bothered us when using other messenger apps. So, we decided to make our own messenger app, that would give users back the confidence in a social messenger. But in a cool, easy and fun way!”.
The messenger has features like setting your online / offline status, searching for available contacts using phonebook / username, you can even turn off user search if you don’t want to be found by others, set your last seen time (to anytime you want), screen shot alert and some other fun features.
Yofam uses the latest web technologies such as Erlang Language, AWS, Ejabbered Chat server, COW BOY, XMPP and Cassandra; Currently major messengers like WhatsApp, Snap chat etc use these for Real Time messaging.
“We are not using any third Party API’s for our app, it’s totally custom built and open source. We are all about real time.” Adel adds.
Though the scale of the project is quite high, but the Yofam team believes that they can pull it off. Currently, their Minimum Viable Product version is already waiting for approval in the UK Apple app store. The MVP version is however built on a thrid party service and BAAS for testing reasons.
The Yofam team has a team of 4 developers (2 frontend and 2 backend developers). Their current challenge is to plug the bugs in both the app and server, so they can ship the stable version before dealine. They are planning to release beta build for the kickstarter community to help test before the formal launch, so they can identify bugs faster.
Adel feels that Yofam has the potential to help connecting people while respecting their privacy.
You can support their kickstarter project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yofam/yofam-messenger-no-more-online-stalking
