Amalgamate: An Integrated Communication Center for Android

Abstract

Email is no longer the primary form of messaging and contact management. People communicate with each other through mobiles in various ways and use different devices/websites to check their messages - SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. Customers of various different interactive and messaging services feel bothered by the various applications and are left to deal with different user interfaces (UI) with a number of inefficiencies, which are also time consuming. We developed a single tabbed Android application named Amalgamate, which can retrieve messages and status updates from various different sources and present these at a single place. In addition, this application will also allow users to send messages/comments/status updates via any of these sources. The display is optimized for quick access and organizes the messages by importance. The application is also intelligent enough to merge the contacts across these services - i.e. it should be able to realize that a Facebook friend ‘Ankit Kamal’ is same as ‘anktkml@gmail.com’ and as ‘ankitkamal_1988’ on Twitter, and thus, should allow the user to reply to a Facebook status update with an email or SMS, or vice versa.