Today we're excited to launch Bump 3.0 for iOS and Android.   

This is a complete overhaul of the entire Bump experience, designed to make in-person, device-to-device interactions even simpler and more powerful, and comes almost exactly three years after we submitted Bump 1.0 to the Apple App Store for review in 2009.  In those three years, Bump has been downloaded by more than 75 million people around the world, making it one of the top mobile apps of all time.  Our users bump millions of items each day, and by next month, more than half a billion photos will have been bumped.  But what makes us most proud is that we've helped make mobile phones more useful by making device-to-device connections as simple as a physical bump, accessible to everyone, not just techies and experts.

When we launched Bump 1.0 three years ago, it was the typical "minimum viable product" -- it only did one thing (let you bump your contact info) and was very rough around the edges (Jake and I did the initial design in Powerpoint!).  But it was good enough to get millions of people to give it a try, which surprised and humbled us.  When it came time to build Bump 2.0, we wanted to satisfy all our users by building many of the features they had requested over the months.

With Bump 3.0, we've taken a different approach and focused on simple connections.  Over the last year, we've watched how people are using Bump, understood what they really love and don't love, and redesigned the app to focus on the two primary uses we kept seeing over and over from our users -- sharing contact information in social settings and sharing photos with close friends and family. Most product launches tout a series of new features; this one does not.  In a bulleted list of features, what we've removed (calendar, music, and app bumping on iOS) actually outnumbers what we've added (mutual friend discovery), but we believe that the result is an app that is simpler, faster, and more useful for everyone.

The most obvious change is the app's navigation.  Bump 2.0 used a springboard-type approach, showing each of the "things you can bump" on the homepage.  But what we found was that each user tends to latch onto one or two things at most, and showing all possible options on the homepage only resulted in confusion.  Bump 3.0 now uses a beautiful swipe-able layer to allow the user to toggle between the different functions of the app while always being ready to bump, no matter where you are in the app.

Bump 3.0 also highlights a feature that we think is one of the most delightful -- mutual friend discovery.  This was buried in the UI of Bump 2.0, but now every time you bump with someone new, Bump will magically show you all your mutual friends in your address books and also on social networks.  In testing Bump 3.0 internally, we've been amazed at how delightful the "how in the world could you possibly know that person?" moment can be, and we're excited to finally highlight this feature in the app.

So what's next?  With Bump 3.0, we think we've built the absolute best way to share contacts or photos in-person with others, in a way that is simple and delightful.  But our goal is to build tools that make all your device-to-device connections and interactions as meaningful and as simple as possible, so we have a lot more coming down the pipe.

-dave and the Bump team