By GroupMe has emerged as a premier group chat experience for several different reasons. For one, it’s dead simple to use and we like simple. Secondly, it introduces unique ways for people to start groups and find other groups to join. Well, the experience has just gotten even better with the unveiling of version 4.0 today.
GroupMe is touting a “completely redesigned look and feel,” which includes more focus on the chats themselves, bigger photos in chats, the ability to share your location or destination with a small map inside the chat, a new way to switch between conversations, bigger avatars to identify group members, the ability to send a DM to a user by tapping their avatar anywhere it appears within the app, and more.
More new features include the ability to invite people to a group with a link, faster performance, and the ability to rejoin groups that you’ve left. There’s a catch for those of us who prefer to do our bidding on Android instead of iOS, though — it’s not quite ready in stable form yet.
You can still give it a shot with this public beta, though, so if you really want to check out the new changes early GroupMe is not boxing you out. You’ll need to have a GroupMe account ahead of time, but if you don’t have one then all you need to do is download and use the current Play Store app with your phone and you’re good to go for the beta. Head here for download and installation instructions and let us know how things are treating you in the comments section below!
[via GroupMe]
I’ve been using it for about 24 hours now and the performance is definitely improved. I work for a US carrier and have about 4 different work groups with about 20 members in each group that are constantly going and haven’t had any hiccups. I like the new layout better than the previous chat bubble style.
A big improvement was pictures that are posted in the chat. Before it seemed like it took forever for them to load and even longer when you tried to enlarge it. Now it zooms in right away when you click on it with all the likes below it, very similar to facebook.
The ability to join former groups is awesome because now you can leave a group while on vacation and then easily rejoin later. Before, you had to keep turning sleep mode on which has a maximum of 12 hours.
Overall, the new update is great. The new layout is much nicer and the speed improvements are a huge plus.
I wish I had a reason to even use it. Most of my friends and family have never even heard of GroupMe lol.
Something that’s cool about it is that if they don’t have the app, they just get the messages as regular SMS. And if they reply, it still goes out to the entire group. So even if you have people on Basic phones, they can still participate.
Just got GroupMe because of this post and love it. You can post .gifs also! This is much fun!