App Review: WNM Near Me

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WNM Near Me is a social network app based on the idea that anything everyone shares will be public and viewable to everyone. It also uses location-based tracking to show you posts people are making nearby your location. The community is small, and frankly none of your friends will be on it, but it is still fun to meet new people across the world. I actually met a friend through WNM who I eventually met in person in NYC at Nokia’s Lumia 920 launch party!

The app itself is quite fluid and speedy. You can instant message people with ease, and can even send pictures. While inside the app, you’ll get toast notifications from new messages. The app also has a nifty notification bar which allows you to quickly access your notifications. It’s a truly excellent app while you’re inside the app.

However, WNM does have a few issues. For example, the push notifications were broken in the latest update. I only receive live tile updates in the background now, which makes the app near useless. My friend only receives toast notifications, which means that if he misses that 10 second notification, he has no clue that he received a message thanks to Windows Phone’s lack of a notification manager. Nevertheless, I’m sure the developer will be fixing these issues in the near future.

The live tile is also quite useless, since it only displays a counter of how many instant messages you received. It would be far more useful if it would preview the message. As it stands now, you would have to wait for the app to open and click the conversations tile just to find out that your friend said “okay” (takes about 6 seconds). It would be far better if you could simply look at the live tile and read the message! (which would take <1 second) The live tile also doesn’t track any replies to your posts… so it’s actually LESS useful than Facebook’s live tile, which is notoriously terrible.

It may seem like I am being overly harsh on the app, but a live tile is simply an essential element for a social network app. If Microsoft did its job correctly, we would have a notification manager and this wouldn’t be an issue. But since Microsoft doesn’t, it’s up to the developers to keep us informed via live tiles. WNM’s live tile simply doesn’t keep us informed of what happened, and we often miss comment replies or new posts because of this.

So overall, WNM Near Me is an excellent app while you are inside the app. However, the app is disappointing when it’s in the background. Nevertheless, the app is free to download and will constantly be improving! Get it here.