Cobook, a contact management app alternative to Mac OS X’s default address book, today released its iOS version, which creates a unified address book by syncing your iPhone contacts with data from social networks. But the game just got more competitive, as Sync.ME, a social contact synchronization service which can display on the screen the latest Facebook statuses or photos from the person calling, today launched an Android version of the app, which you can download from the Google Play store here.
Sync.ME syncs your phone contacts with their Facebook info, including emails, photos, and birthdays, by using a proprietary algorithm that they say can identify and match contacts in spite of potential misspellings and slight text variations between the user’s phonebook and the way it appears on Facebook.
The new Android app also updates the native address book on a user’s phone, which means other third-party apps can use the right information, as well. For example, if a user has WhatsApp on their phone, it will be able to access and use the updated and accurate contact info. The app runs automatically in the background on Android phones and checks for updates every day.
As a result it claims to be syncing a billion contacts a week now. So its move into Android should boost its numbers even further. Sync.ME founder and CTO Ken Vinner says the company wants to become a standard for contact syncing across mobile and social platforms, and they are well-funded to achieve this, recently closing a $4 million funding round with undisclosed private investors.
SyncME competes with other iOS address book replacement apps, including Cobook, a bootstrapped startup from Latvia which has seen 300,000 downloads of its Mac app, Addappt, Plaxo, Brewster and Xobni’s Smartr, among others.