What's New in Ballers

Ballers is a basketball community powered by AI. Our app turns your everyday games into highlight reels, tracks your stats over time, and connects you with the players and courts around you. Sign up at realballers.com for early access.

It's been a big few weeks. Since our last TestFlight build in late February, we've shipped a massive wave of updates across the entire app. Here's everything that's new:

 1. Sleek New Design: Complete visual refresh with a new dark theme across every screen

 2. Post-Game Photos: Snap a watermarked photo after every game with auto-countdown capture

 3. Feed Posting: Create and share posts directly in the feed

 4. Photo & GIF Sharing in Chat: Send images and GIFs in community chatter conversations

 5. Smarter Player Tagging: AI identifies players in your recordings for faster tagging

 6. Highlight Sharing & Editing: Share highlights via link, redesigned editing, and auto-refreshing playback

 7. Communities: Run scheduling, real-time chatter, better onboarding, and challenges

 8. Recording Improvements: Landscape review, auto-save on failure, polished overlay

 9. Local-First Games Tab: Browse games offline with cached data and video duration on cards

 10. Friend Discovery: Revamped UI with better suggestions and search

 11. Profile & Onboarding: Split onboarding steps, height picker, referral tracking, and international phone support

 Read on for the full details.

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Sleek New Design

 We've rolled out a complete visual refresh across the entire app. Every major screen (feed, games, recording, community, and profile) has been redesigned with our new sleek dark theme. Expect cleaner layouts, tighter spacing, and a more polished feel from the moment you open the app.

Post-Game Photos

After you finish recording, the app now launches a post-game photo capture screen. Snap a photo with a 10-second countdown timer (or tap to shoot early), flip between front and back cameras, and retake until you're happy with it.

Your photo automatically gets watermarked with the Ballers logo and uploaded as the thumbnail for your game, so every highlight has a real moment attached to it, not just a random video frame.

Feed Posting

You can now create and share posts directly in the feed. Whether it's a highlight clip, a game recap, or just showing love to your crew, the feed is now a two-way street. Post flow improvements include better input styling and smoother sheet animations.

Photo & GIF Sharing in Community Chat

Community chatter now supports sharing photos and GIFs alongside text. Pick an image from your library, and it gets uploaded and rendered inline in the conversation, making it easy to share moments, memes, and screenshots with your crew in real time.

Smarter Player Tagging with Computer Vision

Our biggest under-the-hood upgrade: the app now uses computer vision to identify players in your recordings. When you tag players after a game, you'll see AI-generated image previews of each detected player, clip category badges, and a shortlist of likely matches, making tagging faster and more accurate than ever. You can also now tag someone by name only (no phone number required), which is great for pickup games with new faces.

Highlight Sharing & Editing

Share your highlights with a direct link that anyone can open. We've also redesigned the edit highlight bottom sheet for a cleaner editing experience, added a requested highlight handoff flow, and made sure retags sync properly across both stories and the main feed. Expired video URLs now auto-refresh so your clips always play back smoothly.

Communities

Communities got a big upgrade this cycle:

• Game Scheduling: Organize and schedule recurring community games and events right from the app
• Chatter: Real-time messaging within your community, complete with photo/GIF sharing, reactions, and highlight sharing
• Better Onboarding: The "Apply to join" button is now front and center, above onboarding questions
• Challenges: What we used to call "contests" are now called "challenges" (same great feature, better name)

 Recording Improvements

 Recording your games should feel noticeably smoother:

• Post-recording screens now lock to landscape orientation so you can review your footage naturally
• Recording settings buttons are always visible and easy to tap
• If processing ever fails, your recording auto-saves to your camera roll so you never lose footage
• The recording overlay and guidance frame have been polished for a cleaner in-session experience

Games Tab Goes Local-First

The games tab now works offline. Your recent games are cached locally, so even with spotty gym Wi-Fi, you can browse games, check details, and queue up clips. Game cards also now show video duration and have a refreshed layout with improved styling.

Friend Discovery

Finding your basketball friends is easier now. We've revamped the friend discovery UI with better suggestions and a smoother search experience.

Profile & Onboarding

• Split onboarding: Setting up your baller profile is now broken into clear, focused steps instead of one long form
• Height picker: Quickly set your height during profile setup
• Public profiles: Your profile looks better when others view it
• Referral tracking: See your referral count and details right from your profile
• International support: Country-code selector for phone signup, so ballers worldwide can join

Notifications

Push notifications are fully wired up. You'll get notified when your highlights are ready, when someone sends you a friend request, and when there's activity in your community.

 Reliability & Performance

 A lot of work went into making the app more stable:

• Authentication and OTP verification flows are rock-solid now, with proper handling for new users and edge cases
• Video playback is more reliable; we fixed issues with expired URLs and redirect handling
• Error messages shown to users are now clean and helpful instead of raw technical errors
• The upload pipeline has been hardened with better error handling and retry logic
• Location services now use Google-backed location for more accurate venue discovery

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 We're moving fast and building this for ballers, by ballers. More updates coming soon!