Moving away from home for the first time brings exciting changes. One change that is definitely not exciting, however, is being away from your friends. While technology and social media have made staying in touch easier than ever, it’s also easy to get wrapped up in your new life and forget to check-in. These apps can help you stay up to date on your friends’ lives without forcing you to take too much time out of your busy schedules to do so!
Marco Polo
Marco Polo is a video messaging app that is great for long-distance friends. It allows you to record a video in the app and send it to your friends- almost like texting through video messages. The great part about it is that you can keep a continuous conversation going whenever you want so you don’t have to try to schedule a time to talk. You can even make group chats so your entire friend group can join the conversation!
Co-star
Co-star gives you a personalized daily horoscope. You might already have this app if you like astrology, but you can use it for more than just checking if mercury is in retrograde. This app lets you see your friends’ horoscopes and compare them to your own. There is also in-app messaging. Checking your friend’s horoscope and sending them a quick message can be a great way to check-in on them and start a conversation if you struggle to find the time.
Garden
Garden is a personal relationship manager. It tracks how often you reach out to people in your life and gives you reminders to do so when you haven’t in a while. This app is great because it can be hard to remember to call or text your friends when you’re trying to balance an already busy schedule, but realizing that you haven’t spoken to someone in three weeks is a pretty good wake-up call.
Rave
Rave allows you to watch Netflix and other streaming services or listen to music at the same time as friends. You can also talk and text in the app while watching. It’s hard to have a movie night when you don’t live in the same place as your friends anymore; by using Rave you can be sure your movie or TV show is perfectly synced up while also talking about how cute you think the main character is.
Touchnote
Touchnote is an app that lets you design and send postcards to your loved ones directly from your phone. This eliminates the hassle of buying stamps and actually mailing the postcards yourself. Getting mail is much more fun than receiving a text and no one does it anymore, so your message will be sure to stand out amongst the hundreds of texts your friends are getting every day.
HeyTell
HeyTell is essentially a walkie-talkie app. With this app, you can send short voice recordings to anyone. Quick voice messages are more personal than sending a text but much less time-consuming than a call or voicemail. You can also carry on a conversation and pick up where you left off so you can easily fit a quick message in while walking to class or during a study break.
While these apps can be helpful, nothing beats a good phone call or FaceTime every once in a while. So if you realize you’ve been lacking on the communication front, just picking up and dialing might be the best thing you can do.