One Month of Foto Private Beta

Recap of the last month for Foto

It’s been 30 days since we launched Private Beta for Foto.

We have over 1900 people testing Foto for us, and they’ve helped us find all sorts of areas where we can make Foto better. Everyone in the Private Beta has been incredibly generous and insightful. We are grateful for their continued support in helping shape Foto into a new photo-sharing alternative.

When we launched Private Beta on Sept. 27th, we knew Foto needed to include a lot of features that we had already identified. The beautiful thing about getting a group of people onto any new piece of software is that they will find things we didn’t find in our testing, they’ll attempt to do actions we didn’t think of, and they will stress test the system.

We spent the first two weeks of Private Beta collecting and organizing all the excellent feedback we were getting. Currently, we have multiple lanes on our Trello board with many different ideas, bugs, and features for us to work through. The last two weeks have been quieter because we are working on adding replies to Foto, which is a huge missing feature that everyone needs to facilitate dialogue.

Over the past month, we pushed several updates to all our Apple and Android users.

A few of the features we’ve added are….

• Added the ability to see all photos being uploaded to Foto on the Search Page.

• Added the ability to click on profile pictures within the Comment Page.

• Added double-tap to ‘like’ a post

• Added ‘Pull to Refresh’ on the Search/Discovery Page

• Fixed a lot of bugs related to adding comments

What we are working on now is the ability to reply to a comment and the ability to ‘reply to a reply’ so that people can chat back and forth endlessly.

We hope to launch the Reply Feature within the first week of November. This one has been complicated to build, but it will have a massive impact on the community using Foto.

What’s next for the rest of 2023?

We only have two months left in the year, so here is a rough roadmap of what we will work on.

• Discovery Feature 1.0

• Add auto-capitalization at the start of a post/comment

• Replies - (hoping to be done within seven days)

• Improve the speed and performance of Foto

• Push Notifications

• Zoom in on an image

• Add content preview to the notification page

• See who liked your post

Once we get these above items done, we will then open a 2nd Round for people who want to join the Private Beta.

It’s hard to predict precisely how long the above list will take, but we are hoping to get it done sometime in November.

This 2nd Round of Private Beta will likely be the last time we add Private Beta users. We will again ask for a one-time donation of $5 to be involved with Private Beta.

Once you become a Private Beta User, you’ll always be able to be first in line to test new Foto features before we push them publicly. You’ll be a Beta User for life and get to help shape Foto before anyone else will.

Stay tuned to our Substack for more details on the 2nd Round of Private Beta.

If we have time left in 2023, we’ll start chipping away at this list below, but it will likely extend into 2024.

• Mentions

• Share someone else’s post to your feed

• Add pull to refresh the profile page

• Add ability to search by first and last name

• Add ability to share a link to a post/profile outside of Foto

Foto Chat

Last, if you want to stay updated with all things Foto, one of the best places to do that is by joining the Foto Chat here on Substack. This is where I often post the latest updates about Foto and get your feedback. Foto Chat is also a great place to connect with others within the Foto Community.

Thank you again for all the beautiful conversations and feedback in the last 30 days. We are a small team of two people, so your patience is appreciated as we chip away at improving Foto each week. This last month has filled us with encouragement and belief that we are onto something influential for the photography community.

Thanks for being here!

Cheers,

Michael Howard

Co-Founder of Foto

fotoapp.co

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