Hello dear reader!
For any developer that has Apps on the App Store there is a dream, getting featured on the today tab. Not only does that show a huge recognition from Apple, it all exposes your App to a huge audience and helps you spread the word. Our goal with Sister was always to put it in as many hands as possible to make women feel safer, so today we can finally announce, that Sister is the featured App of the day on the App Store!
Here is a copy of the excerpt from the App Store.
Your personal safety is a top priority. If you’re walking home alone, the geolocation app Sister lets you share your live location with your chosen contacts, giving you the reassurance that a friend or loved one is with you every step of the way. What we love: How the app puts your safety front and centre of everything. Tell Sister your destination and it will show you the fastest and safest route, as well as the nearest police stations along the way, just in case. When you choose your destination, you can also set a deterrent alarm that will go off loudly if you’ve not confirmed that you’ve arrived. Quick tip: If you’re in danger, activate the app’s SOS button with one tap. Your contacts who have Sister installed will immediately be notified of your location. The app will also display the number for the emergency services and automatically take photos and record what’s happening. Meet the creator: Sister is created by women for women. But it’s not just an app, it’s a technological ally in the fight against sexual harassment. The Sister team also work with international NGOs to improve the safety of girls and women around the world.
We are so thrilled by new people joining the Sister movement we have created a small summary of it’s features you can check out below:
For the vast majority of women, going home at night is a real ordeal. Specifically, five out of six women surveyed by the female security application Sister (83% of a sample made up of more than 35,000) affirm that they are most afraid when walking alone at night on the street. 45% of them are also scared during the day, if walking alone.
The Sister study about women safety also reveals that almost half of women (45%) are always scared walking down the street, regardless of what time of day it is. The situations in which they are afraid of being attacked when they are alone are diverse.
Asked about the defense mechanisms they use when walking alone at night, 78% of women choose to write to their friends or partners commenting on their route home, while only 33% choose to share their location with trusted contacts as friends or partners but will be willing to do so if they had an specific app with features dedicated to improve women’ safety.
“Many times, my friends and I call each other when we each return home,” one of the young women interviewed said. Another of the participants in the survey affirms that she, in any case, always tries to communicate with her friends during the way and tells them that she is safe when she gets home. “At least tell your friends or do something. I think we all do that,” she said.
How does Sister work?
The app has an array of safety tools for women from the moment they leave home until they return; it does this by providing a secure environment in which to share their real time location with their trusted contacts.
To begin with, once the trusted contacts are saved in “contacts”, the user can start sharing her location with them from the map on the main screen, selecting the contacts on “following by”. If a green dot appears near the contact, it means that the contact is seeing her steps in real time.
Then, on the map, she can activate other functionalities by pressing “+” such as GPS or safety maps.
On the GPS, the user can set up a destination or choose one from the list if she has previously saved it on “places”. The app will show her the best way to go. If she activates the safety map, she will also see reddish areas on the map, which are danger zones where other users have recently asked for help.
In this same menu and since this month of December 2021, Sister has launched the false call, another modality especially dedicated to dispatching stalkers who do not take a “no” for an answer and who may be dissuaded when the user pretends to speak to someone who is going to go to pick her up.
This very requested feature is a game changer, we are so proud of how it works we made a small video to show you.
Once she feels safe, she can stop sharing their live location on the main map by selecting “followed by”, clicking on the contacts and selecting “stop sharing location”. The PIN code will be needed to deactivate the session.
Users will also be able to follow their friends on the main menu, selecting on the map “following” and seeing the location of the friends that requested to be accompanied.
In case of danger and to improve security, the app has a SOS button that appears on the main map and, if activated, this will alert all the user’s contacts of her position and the danger she is in. Whenever she feels secure again, she can select on the map “cancel SOS” to cancel the alert, stop sharing her location and automatically tell their contacts that she is fine. The PIN will also be needed here to deactivate SOS.
In a revolutionary way and unlike other apps related to improve women’ safety, Sister also collects audios and images by activating SOS that are stored in its cloud in an encrypted way for use in a subsequent judicial process for harassment or assault. To access them, the user must request them by email to Sister.
In this way, the Sister women’s security app accompanies users from the time they leave home until they return, and even if they have a problem, it continues helping them during the judicial process in which they are often questioned.
Sister has been designed to improve women security by a group of women who have taken into account the survey data and the conclusions of the analysis groups developed in the university environment. Available for free for iOS and Android, the app is already on the market, ready to be downloaded. Try it out now and let us know what else you would like to have in order to improve your safety.
And that’s all for today folks! Thank you for reading and I hope you share our excitement in expanding Sister even further!
Pablo Clemente Pérez 