Yubo's 2022 product updates recap

2022 has been an amazing roller coaster for Yubo, a year full of challenges but more importantly, full of big achievements. The app has evolved significantly, releasing new updates and features with three main focuses: making the app safer than ever before, creating tailored exclusive features for users to find friends more easily, and finally, diversifying our user experience on livestreams.

SAFETY

We updated our reporting system. Although our reporting process has always been simple and accessible for our users in allowing them to communicate concerns about suspicious or harmful behaviors, user profiles or situations they experience on the app, we have improved the tool further to make it more effective for our Safety Specialists. This enables Yubo’s safety team to address any issues that are flagged by our users and take appropriate actions much faster than ever before. 

Users are now able to share more information and submit a longer message explaining any troubles they are facing on the app. Users can also now add up to four media files to their reports in order to provide our Safety Specialists with more context and help them to better understand the problem.

Our users’ safety is our number one concern, and it is important to Yubo that every user has sufficient agency to acknowledge how they are feeling and report any profiles or behaviors that are harmful or make them uncomfortable. 

We introduced a new age verification system in partnership with digital identity provider Yoti. Thanks to this new feature, Yubo has officially become the first social media platform to age-verify 100% of its users all over the world, with all users successfully verified in less than 3 months. With comprehensive age verification, Yubo can help ensure that everyone on the app is the age they say they are and give users confidence in who they are interacting with online. It also helps to prevent fake profiles, bots and people with bad intentions from accessing the platform, and to ensure users are socializing with others in their similar age group with a higher level of accuracy.

Making Yubo as safe an environment as possible where users feel empowered to interact online is of key importance to Yubo. This is why we give our users control of who they decide to and also why we allow them to block or report any users they are having problems with. 

We developed an audio moderation technology for livestreams, released for our English-speaking users in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. In partnership with Hive, a new machine learning AI was released that tackles challenges of real-time audio analysis. The AI records and automatically transcribes 10-second snippets of audio in livestreams of 10 or more people. The text is scanned by the algorithm instantly and only transcripts containing words or phrases that violate Yubo’s Community Guidelines are flagged for review by Yubo’s safety specialists. Transcripts with no suspected violations are not reviewed nor kept. As this technology continues to improve, it will help Yubo detect hate speech, bullying and harassment, violence and self-harm. 

PAID-FOR FEATURES 

We created an “Elite Pack” that our users can purchase for access to exclusive new features. This pack is an extension of the “Power Pack,”it  which provides users with unlimited swipes, a boost (to maximize the visibility of your lives), a turbo (to make your profile more visible in swipes) and a spotlight (to highlight your profile by putting it at the top of other users screens) each week. On top of that, with the “Elite Pack”, users are now able to send DMs to other users before they become friends, appear first in swipes for anyone they like and have access to their swipe history.

We expanded our “Pixels” collections, with more than 313 pixels released this year. Launched in 2021, Pixels are collectible digital art representing characters, emotions or personalities that users can purchase within the app. Users can collect as many Pixels as they’d like to add on their profile or send as a gift to their friends. Each new collection is created in collaboration with artists from all over the world – from Ulises Mendicutty’s futurist pink portraits, Velvet Kid’s anime-inspired creations to Lili Bellons’ watercolor illustrations, this year has been rich in creation for Yubo. 

All of these paid features allow our users to personalize their profiles and diversify their app experience. Yubo plans to continue providing its users with valuable and creative offerings with amazing new partnerships to be revealed soon. 

USER EXPERIENCE

We revamped our live feed. In order for our users to have a more tailored experience from a content perspective, our new feed has been designed this year to adapt to each specific user. The feed now takes into account what a user likes, who they are friends with or what they are looking for on Yubo. The layout has been redesigned, segmented into categories of interests scrollable horizontally, all while still being able to browse the next categories vertically.

The Lives with your friends are also now prioritized on the feed to help our users continue to build strong friendships by, for instance, participating in recurrent lives with people that share similar interests, passions or cultures.

We recently released new interactive lenses, available using Snap’s Camera Kit tool. In addition to more than 30 filters already integrated on the app, our users now have the possibility to play games and challenge their friends through interactive, exclusive and fun lenses. For example, Yubo recently introduced a filter game called “Pixel Muncher,” where the goal is to catch as many falling Pixels on the screen as possible with your opened mouth on camera. The biggest scorers win! In “Fish Frenzy,” you have to take your fish as far as possible by opening your mouth to make him swim slower or faster while avoiding obstacles in your way. The longer you hold, the higher your score will be. 

We’ve moved forward in integrating more product features and updates on Android. It’s now possible for our Android users to screenshare content during their Live, making the experience more engaging and participative. This has been highly requested by our users for a while as it allows them to share pictures, videos, music or any other content they want their new friends to relate to or experience with them. 

The new Live feed has also been implemented on Android, and iterations are still running to adapt the initial version to users’ needs and preferences. Early 2023, we will also integrate the YouTube player, already available on iOS, as a new exciting feature for our Android audience.