Guardian Circle, a Neo-based decentralized emergency response service, has released v3.5 of its mobile application. Following a period of exponential growth in user acquisition during the COVID-19 pandemic, Guardian Circle has implemented changes designed to streamline the onboarding process and improve the overall user experience.

Following the release, Guardian Circle CEO and co-founder, Mark Jeffrey tweeted, “We have had a TON of new downloads since the #covid19 crisis began, so we’ve learned a lot about our usage very fast and scrambled to get this version out quickly.”

Users growth of Guardian Circle app. Image supplied by Guardian Circle.

Speaking with Neo News Today, Jeffrey said, “[before COVID-19] it had been a marketing challenge to get people to think about emergencies before they happen; it was a tough sell. Now, people are thinking about emergencies everyday, which has been driving traffic for us. The idea of peer-to-peer emergency response is no longer insane. It’s the logical thing to do.”

In addition to the response to the global pandemic, Guardian Circle attributes some of its growth in new users to an affiliate program launched in March 2020. The affiliate program allows users to earn NEP-5 GUARD token rewards for registration, referrals, and answering alerts.

The Guardian Circle development team claims to have rewritten nearly a third of the code for the application over the last month.

Improved onboarding experience

In previous versions, Guardian Circle users were required to back up their wallet keys and phrases upon account creation. The company found that this process was confusing to new users who weren’t familiar with cryptocurrency wallets.

Jeffrey, said, “we have to be practical. If people aren’t onboarding onto the app, then backing up their wallet doesn’t matter. So, we’re focusing on onboarding the users first.”

In the v3.5 update, this process no longer occurs automatically, but instead allows users to save pertinent information through the wallet feature in the Guardian Circle app.

Guardian Circle also learned that new users generally don’t like granting apps permission to access their contacts, which was previously required upon app installation. In Guardian Circle v3.5, users are only required to grant access to contacts upon inviting a new Guardian.

The flow for inviting non-users is dependent on SMS text messaging, which is only accessible in the app through permissioned access to a user’s contact list. Therefore, if the user decides not to give access, they can not send registration links to individuals that are not already registered on the app.

Additionally, the updated app now features a video that walks users through the process of adding Guardians.

At the time of publishing, Guardian Circle v3.5 is available on the Google Play store, with App Store availability expected to follow in the coming week.

The announcement can be found at the link below:
https://twitter.com/markjeffrey/status/1258560006183501824?s=20

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