Circle

Circle is a platform for running a community under your own brand, and this app is how members and organisers use it from a phone. The developer's description is short, so here is what that means in practice rather than an invented feature list. Communities built on Circle bring several things into one place that would otherwise be scattered: threaded discussions, member profiles, live streaming, chat, events and paid memberships. The alternative most communities live with is a chat group for talking, a mailing list for announcements, a separate platform for video, another for payments and a spreadsheet holding the membership, with nobody quite sure which channel a given conversation happened in. Consolidating that solves a real problem for anyone running a paid community, a course, a professional network or a membership organisation. Running under your own brand rather than inside somebody else's social network is the second point, and it matters commercially: your members are yours, your content is not subject to an algorithm, and the relationship does not disappear if a platform changes its rules. For members, the app is simply where the community lives: read discussions, join events, watch streams and message people, with notifications when something you follow moves.