As a Steemit newbie I’ve been scouring the web for useful tools to help me in my pursuit of growing beyond the Plankton user title. One of the first mobile tools I ran across that has helped me out immensely is Steemify for iOS.

Steemify, built by @blockbrothers, is a completely free app that allows you to get push notifications in real time about your account or any other user on Steem. That means you can get notified whenever you get an up vote, comment on a post, reply to one of your comments, and much much more. It also allows you to get notifications about other Steemians, like alerting you the second they post something new.

One of the first things I’ve learned on Steemit is that it pays to be quick. Quick to up vote a great new post by a favorite author and quick to be one of the first commenters. I should clarify that it’s beneficial to be the first to comment with a useful, well thought-out comment. Being the first to comment “First!” or “Thank you for posting” won’t win you any friends.

The name of the game on any social platform is attention, meaning you want to strike while the iron is hot and the post’s author has their attention on the post and comments section. I also believe being one of the first to up vote a quality post will also help when it comes to curation rewards (if I’m understanding the platform correctly).

Following users on Steemify

After you’ve downloaded Steemify and entered your username the first thing you’ll want to do is follow some of your favorite authors. On the main screen you’ll want to hit the settings gear in the top right, and then the ‘+’ button in the top right. Enter the username of the person you want to follow and hit save.

Controlling which notifications you receive

https://i.imgur.com/RzFBjn3.png

By default you’ll get a lot of notifications about your own account. Tapping your name on the Steemians page will let you control the specifics. You’ll be able to choose whether you get notified on replies to your posts, replies to a reply you made on someone else’s post, up votes on your posts & replies, mentions, follows/unfollows, and transfers.

I currently have all default features enabled because there’s not a lot of activity around my account as a new user :( For some more popular users this will probably get really annoying so you’ll want to tweak your settings.

After you’ve added a user to follow you can also control the level of notifications you’d like to receive about them - or as I see it: you can tweak your stalker level. At the moment I’m just following when users post but any of the options I listed above can be applied to people you follow as well.

Notification Speed

https://i.imgur.com/AeH2kfd.png

Notifications aren’t quite instant but they’re pretty darn quick. I’d say within about 15-30 seconds of activity happening on Steem, you’ll have a message sitting on the notification screen of your iPhone or iPad. This is more than quick enough to be the first, or one of the first, to read or respond to a new post or reply. It’s definitely way quicker than smashing the refresh button all day.

Security

One of my favorite features has to be how secure the app is, and what I mean by that is the app doesn’t ask for any of your Steem keys. I’m a bit paranoid about security, especially when it comes to crypto, so one of the biggest selling points was that they don’t need any details other than a Steem username for the app to work.

Android Support (or lack thereof.. for now)

Currently the app is iOS-only but the team at @blockbrothers has recently posted saying that an Android app is in the works and will be available soon (read more about that here).

If you’re an Android user I suggest following them for future updates. Perhaps some Android users could offer similar alternatives below, if you know of any please share!

Feature Requests

Currently I only have one pet peeve with Steemify and it’s that there are no audio or haptic (vibrate) alerts available. This means that you essentially need to be looking at your phone when a notification comes in to know about it. This is fine for me when I’m at my desk with my phone face up, but not so useful on the go.

I understand that audio or haptic notifications could be really annoying if you have a ton of notifications pouring in all day from Steem, but I’d like to see the option added (even if turned off by default). I’d be extremely pleased if audio/haptic alerts had as much granularity as the normal notification settings so you can choose to only have your phone make noise or vibrate when you get a reply or only when a favorite author posts something new.

Where to get Steemify

You can grab Steemify on the iOS App Store by searching for it on your device, or by smacking the download button below:

Thanks to @blockbrothers for making such a great application!

On the hunt for other cool Steem apps

If you know of any other must-have apps for improving the Steem experience please let me know! I’m primarily an iOS, Mac and Linux user but I’m sure others would love Android and Windows recommendations as well. Web apps are even better!