Microsoft’s new Tossup app wants to help you make it easier to wrangle a group of friends for a night out

Igor Bonifacic

July 6, 2015 6:13pm

Let's be honest here, getting a group of friends all in one place can be a pain in the butt. Thankfully, there's a new app that aims to resolve that particular butt pain point.

Developed by Microsoft's Garage team, a small group within the company that's focused on developing experimental software, Tossup allows users to suggest and vote on event ideas. The intent here is to help take away the type of indecision that tends to plague any occasion where a large group of flakey people need to decide what to do on a given night.

To help expedite this process, it's possible to add a countdown clock to each decision. And once a decision is made, anyone that voted on it gets a calendar invite. If, after all that, your friends still bail, then it's probably time to get a new set of friends.

Tossup is, unfortunately, only available on Android and iOS smartphones right now. Sorry, Windows Phone users.

Besides being a no show on Windows Phone, the app has at least one other idiosyncrasy that differentiates it from most of Microsoft's other mobile releases.

When a user launches the app for the first time, they're asked to input their phone number and wait for a verification code. Once that step is completed, the user inputs their name and email address. In other words, no where in this process is a person asked to log in using their Microsoft account. This, I suspect, was done to make signing up for the app as easy possible. After all, it's easy to imagine how an app like this live and dies by the number of people that sign up to use it.

That said, as with the Garage team's other releases, it's tough to say whether Tossup will evolve into something substantial. The team's other recent effort, InstaNote, is an interesting and helpful app, but it is not like it's setting the world on fire right now. The division also released an Android lock screen and a number of interesting apps for various platforms last year.

Those that would like to try out Tossup, can do so by downloading it either from the iTunes App Store or Google Play Store.

>

Source: Microsoft's new Tossup app wants to help you make it easier to wrangle a group of friends for a night out