If you like social apps and you are bored of Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and others - here is your chance! IRL is a "new" social app which syncs with your calendar and shows your near events based on whom do you follow. Your friends, celebrities and media are already there. The app started on iOS first in 2018 and today I managed to discover it on Google Play in Early Access mode but I am not sure when exactly was it published.
First of all, it asks for some additional permissions to your Google Calendar. You can select which of your accounts to sync, which is good in case if you don't want to expose your work calendar for example.
There are 3 tabs in the bottom - Calendar, New and Explore. Plus search, plus settings, plus profile and all other social features around.
Discovery
At first, you will be suggested to follow some verified celebrities. I am not really interested in following them so I navigated to the search to try to found someone whom I know. Also, as soon as you have enough people's contacts you will have someone to follow. I found one person in IRL out of my 100 contacts and it is at least something because I don't like calling people and obviously don't have many contacts 📲 I managed to found "Pokemongo" and "TechCrunch Events" there so far but yet not more.
Events
You can create an event by yourself - it requires a date, location, name, description and a picture. You can also add a link to tickets, add a poll or join a live chat room.
The app itself should become more interesting as soon as it will get more people on board. I definitely will keep it installed for a month to see where it is going.
Bugs
There are some minor issues with UI updates (in profile edit section for example) and also this Instabug reporting pop-up is too sensitive.
I like the app concept in general, most probably it can become an important traffic source for events/meetups hosters. As reported earlier by TechCrunch - the app also got a second round of funding in June 2019 which makes it even more interesting to watch. Apart from that, I hope that it will be more successful than Vero Beta in the past.
Happy testing!
