A tour of Namaste Community, feature by feature

Namaste Community has grown a fair bit since the first version. This is a proper walk through what’s in the app today — including a few things that are easy to miss.

📖 Yellow Pages

A directory of businesses and professionals, built around the thing that actually matters when you’ve just moved: whether they’ll understand you. Listings can say which languages they speak, and you can filter by category, city and distance.

Every listing is reviewed before it goes live, and members can leave ratings and reviews. Phone, WhatsApp and email are visible to signed-in members inside the app — deliberately not on the public web, so business owners don’t get scraped.

🛍️ Marketplace

Three sections, because “for sale”, “to let” and “to borrow” are genuinely different things and squeezing them into one form helps nobody. Buy & Sell is furniture from someone moving back home, a bike, a pushchair, kitchen equipment. House rentals is property, with bedrooms, furnished and the deposit a lease needs. And Rentals is for lending out things — a drill, a camera, a gazebo — at a day rate, with a deposit that is always required and a switch that marks the item rented out rather than making you delete the listing. More on lending here.

Up to eight photos on a listing, all of them shown, and a distance on every card. Message a seller directly in the app. No phone number swap needed to start.

🫂 Groups

Chat rooms for people in one place — a running club, a book club, the parents at one school. Every group is anchored to a meeting place and a radius its creator chooses, so what you see is what you could actually turn up to. Live messages, photos, quote-replies and polls inside; mute per group; owner approval on the door if the owner wants it. You will find them in the Hub tab. The full tour of Groups is here.

💬 Ask

The heart of it, honestly. Questions about visas, schools, doctors who speak English, where to find good paneer, whether a landlord is allowed to ask for that.

📅 Events

Festivals, meet-ups, dance classes, temple events. RSVP in a tap, see who else is going, and add it straight to your phone’s calendar. Organisers can now attach an event website and a ticket link, so “where do I actually buy tickets?” has an obvious answer.

✨ The AI bits

Writing a good listing is work, and most people give up halfway. So the app helps:

🆘 SOS and safety

An SOS screen with the emergency numbers that matter here, plus your own emergency contacts. Alongside that: block and report on every profile and post, moderation on everything before it goes public, and full account deletion from inside the app.

🌍 Languages and location

The app speaks English, French and Dutch, and follows the language on your profile.

And everything is distance-aware — not as a filter bolted onto one screen, but as the organising idea. One chip in the app bar sets your radius at 10, 50, 100 or 200 km, and every tab reshapes around it at once, nearest first, with the distance printed on each card. There is deliberately no “everywhere”: the widest view is your own country. Why we built it that way.

What’s next

More of what you ask for, mostly. If something here is missing or half-baked, tell us via the feedback form or WhatsApp — we read all of it.