Your virtual office—now in your pocket. Tandem for iPhone and iPad allows you to see who's talking on your team and join meetings, rooms, and conversations while on the go.
See who's around and tap on a teammate to 👋 wave or talk!
See what rooms or meetings are active, and 👂listen in with a tap.
Do a 🚶♀️🚶♂️walking 1-on-1 to break up the day.
Take your meetings on the go.
View screen share.
Audio-first experience, but you can also send and receive videos (beta)
Many teams are moving to a hybrid future, which means increasingly, we have group conversations with some teammates in-person and some remote. (For an in-depth look at the future of hybrid, especially multiplayer apps and presence, see Rajiv's recent piece on Future: Hybrid Anxiety and Hybrid Optimism.)
Same Room Setting
Selecting 'We're in the same room' prevents audio feedback on hybrid calls (i.e. when some participants are in-person and some are remote). For example, if Vivy selects "Same room" with Cyrus, then Vivy and Cyrus will not hear each others' audio, but other participants will hear them.
We suggest wearing headphones when in the same physical room. Tandem will remember this setting for the rest of the day.
You can also join a meeting in Same Room mode by right-clicking on a meeting participant.
In addition, Tandem may infer you're in-person (if you're on the same WiFi), and will show a suggestion prompt.
Find this on the Start Camera button in device settings. (Note: not recommended if you've disabled GPU acceleration)
Google Calendar Add-on
You can now add Tandem as a meeting option for yourself or your organization. You can meet with anyone—not just in your team—and they can join in-browser or download Tandem. Note: they won't be added to your team automatically, but if they're part of your org, they may be able to join your team (admins can control this in Settings > Preferences > Teams).
Notify-when-free: You can now get notified for teammates who are recently away (bright orange dot). Right click on a teammate to get notified when they're free.
in-call chat: added a red dot for unread messages.
Hide irrelevant rooms with an easy expander toggle ('more rooms')
clear unread waves after 24 hours
custom status will be published to all your teams (not just active team)
Bug Fixes and Infra
Infra for call reliability, scaling, and performance form the bulk of our efforts.
Call connection bug fixes
On Windows, better fallback logic for choosing audio and video devices.
Fixed screenshare from browser
Fixed bugs with Crosstalk (flexible large-group conversations) and
Fixed custom room background covers not showing up
Fixed /random broken on cross-team and cross-org calls
Need to talk with an offline teammate? No problem! Right click on their name, click "Notify me when free," and you'll get a handy reminder when they're next online and not in a call or scheduled meeting. You can then either talk to them directly or wave.
Infrastructure upgrades
The majority of our work at Tandem over the past 6 months has been on audio-video reliability, overall app reliability, and performance. Through a deep infrastructure upgrade that we may talk more publicly about in the future, we've reduced issues overall by roughly 3x.
Recently, though, we've received slightly more frequent reports of call issues and general app issues, and as we investigate we've found they're symptoms of new infrastructure upgrades - upgrades that, long-term, will make our calls significantly better.
It's a short-term setback. We don't want this to happen again, so here's what we're doing, and what you can do to help:
expanding our QA team
enhanced logging and telemetry to give us even more visibility on network-related issues.
continuing to grow our back-end and audio-video team (we're hiring!)
What you can do to help:
When there's a call issue, log a bug and describe from your experience what happened. This allows us to map the "genotype" (root cause) to the "phenotype" (user-experience).
During a callWhen you leave the call
2. Forgot to log feedback during the call? No problem: You can now log feedback from your last few calls by clicking the '?':
3. If you experience performance-related issues, please click the ? to send us a message, and include a screenshot of your activity monitor.
Over the next few months you should see increased stability in the app, more reliable and faster connect times, and improved video and screen share performance. Thank you for all your feedback - please keep sending it! We read every piece of feedback that comes to us with gratitude 🙏
Other updates:
fixes for "audio device is in use" issues by trying preferred device, then the default system device
fix for tooltip appearing behind call box
fix for clicking DM notif not taking you to DM
fix for dnd not triggering on startup
crash fixes
fix for intermittent call connection issues
full names for 50+ member teams
scroll correction for fewer mis-clicks
show fewer irrelevant teammates and rooms
control volume per-user (click on teammate's name during a call)
HD and bluetooth audio toggles (caret ^ in the mute button)
new auto-join teams behavior
meeting reminders with auto-join (see Settings > Meetings)
"Every company is a remote company." I said this on-stage at YC Demo Day in 2019, meaning that every company becomes distributed as it scales (multiple offices, travelers, working-from-home). I didn’t anticipate a global pandemic would make this plainly true. In weeks, Tandem usage jumped 30x...
...The blogosphere and media took note, adding Tandem and other newly launched Virtual Offices into roundups of "remote tools" and "collaboration tools." While not wrong, they failed to capture what makes the Virtual Office a distinct product category.
This post will cover the rise of the Virtual Office and how it transforms distributed work. I'll also unpack the key concept of Presence...
