We started Tandem when my two co-founders each had kids and started working remotely. We missed the flow and camaraderie of working together, so we started building. Since then, my co-founders' kids are walking and talking (and high-fiving us on Tandem), and we've been joined by a truly world-class set of builders and thinkers that have pushed our vision of Tandem further and further.
It would mean a lot to us if you'd show us some love, leave a comment, or share with friends!
We're launching three major new features today on Product Hunt:
👥 Team Tables: a new casual mode to unlock serendipity and co-working!
📱 Android is here: It's a virtual office in your pocket!
📅 Never be late to a Meeting: stay in flow with Meeting Reminders and Auto-Join. No need to check your calendar!
We recently launched background blur. Now by popular demand, we've added virtual backgrounds. Here's a demo video:
Screenshare improvements:
More bandwidth-efficient screenshare
Allow screenshare viewers to adjust the quality of the screenshare
while screensharing, fade cursors after 5 second of not moving
Ability to stop someone’s screenshare - e.g. if they forgot to stop screensharing (click on their name in the call box)
Meetings
If someone’s in a Zoom/Meet meeting on Tandem, you can still call them (you'll be warned first)
In the Meeting Details side panel (click on a meeting title in the team list), you can invite meeting participants to Tandem in a click.
Other call improvements
Renamed “Start side conversation” to “Invite to a new conversation” in user menu
On a call, there's an “Add people” button in the triple dot menu
Leave calls quietly (only play a leave sound when you/they become the last person)
Small improvements to Same Room (hybrid calls) feature - e.g. the "Same Wifi Detected" dialog is always on top
Chat improvements: emoji responses are larger, shortcodes (like Slack, but no autocomplete), no jittering, delete or copy messages (right-click on the message), fix for double-sending messages on disconnect
Fixed cases where reconnect could get stuck
Fixed missing streams when other users reconnect
Fixed “chonky” video when HD mode and FPS mitigation kicks in
Fixed custom apps not showing up as presence on Windows
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)
Launch Zoom/Meet meetings from Tandem
Now, you can see, join, and launch Meet/Zoom meetings in Tandem.
When a meeting event has a Meet/Zoom (or other service), you can choose to start the meeting in Tandem or launch the conferencing service (admins can set team-wide defaults). Your teammates will see you in the meeting room on Tandem and can join you in Meet/Zoom.
You'll automatically leave the meeting room at the meeting end time, or you can click Leave to remove yourself from the meeting.
While on Meet/Zoom you can switch to Tandem in 1-click (meeting details panel → Switch to Tandem). All the participants will be added to a new Tandem call.
Never be late to a meeting: Meeting Reminders let you auto-join the meeting exactly on time, and will show both a Meet/Zoom button and a Tandem button. To activate, go to Settings > Meetings > Show meeting reminders.
In case you missed it:
G Suite Add-on to add Tandem meeting links to scheduled events. - Learn more
Meeting reminders - Never be late to a meeting - Learn more
Same Physical Room (prevent echo/feedback on hybrid calls) - Learn more
Notify me when a teammate is free - Learn more
Improvements
📡 Improved Google Calendar syncing
🔗 Copying meeting links is now more accessible in and out of calls
📆 Browser meetings are now supported in Safari (beta)
Hovering over teammates listening to Spotify shows cover art (requires Spotify integration)
Chat supports up to 30MB uploads
Mighty Browser is supported in Tandem
In the main app, calls now show profile images instead of a blue circle
Refreshed images and text in integration settings pages
Improved in-call More Options menu (three dots).
Mute everyone now mutes yourself as well.
Pressing CMD + W during a call will ask you to confirm before leaving
Added a setting for disabling same room wifi modal
Added a team admin setting to make meeting titles private
Starting or joining a crosstalk automatically unmutes you
Fixes
Fixed bug where you call someone but they don't show up in your callbox right away
Fixed unanswered callers not leaving automatically
Fixed an issue with local time when hovering over a teammate tooltip
Fixed bug with empty video unit when toggling blur quickly
Fixed room covers not working properly
Fixed a few issues when using "Same room" feature (prevent echo and feedback during hybrid in-person / remote calls).
Fixed various call participant actions (invite participants, make dj, wave from details pane, click on music, call user from chat)
Fixed stuck members in call box
Fixed celebration emojis for web calls
Fixed for load more messages shown in call window
Fixed layout issues with small call window
Fixed screenshare overlay still hanging out after call is done
Fixed the scrollbar showing up sometimes on call window
Fixed window sizing causing windows to float to front
Now, you can see, join, and launch Meet/Zoom meetings in Tandem.
When a meeting event has a Meet/Zoom (or other service), you can choose to start the meeting in Tandem or launch the conferencing service (admins can set team-wide defaults). Your teammates will see you in the meeting room on Tandem and can join you in Meet/Zoom.
You'll automatically leave the meeting room at the meeting end time, or you can click Leave to remove yourself from the meeting.
While on Meet/Zoom you can switch to Tandem in 1-click (meeting details panel → Switch to Tandem). All the participants will be added to a new Tandem call.
Never be late to a meeting: Meeting Reminders let you auto-join the meeting exactly on time, and will show both a Meet/Zoom button and a Tandem button. To activate, go to Settings > Meetings > Show meeting reminders.
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...
Clicking the caret on the microphone icon will show two new options:
Use Send HD Audio when you want crystal-clear audio, especially for music or other non-speech sounds.
Use Bluetooth Music Mode when you're co-working and listening to music with Bluetooth headphones. While muted, Tandem will disable your mic to enhance music quality.
By clicking on a teammate's name, you can also adjust their volume (this will only apply to you) — for that one co-worker you love who's just a little loud (or quiet).
