What if your texts traveled as slowly as a carrier pigeon?
The carrier pigeon was halfway across the Atlantic Ocean and was flying towards Toronto. His message sent from London would take more than a day to arrive.
But when the letter landed, it wasn’t untied from the skinny leg, but rather opened in the app, because this pigeon was digital, not physical.
A lot of time was devoted to speeding up human communication, from the telegram to the Pony Express to shouting loudly from the rooftops. Recently, at least two applications have been asking: Was the carrier pigeon the highlight?
One app exploring this idea is Carrier Pidge, an app that allows users to send messages at the speed of a pigeon. Users track their bird on a map as it whips towards the target.
Like real birds, digital pigeons have a 0.2 percent chance of getting lost or dying. A new in-app purchase will set you back 99 cents.
As it turns out, this slower, riskier, and more expensive version of messaging has broad appeal.
“Some things are better when they’re worse,” said Olivia Macdonald, 27, who uses the app to message her boyfriend. Her texts arrive within minutes — they both live in Manhattan — but the likelihood of the pigeon disappearing adds intrigue, she said.
“That uncertainty, compared to the numbness we feel when we get so many texts and notifications a day, is something I find really attractive about it,” Ms Macdonald said.
Launched in April, the Carrier Pidge exploded in popularity the following month post about the app by its developer Noah Iarrobin has been shared by thousands. After a few months with just a few hundred users, he said, the app now has more than 75,000.
Another app released in April, Roost, which lets users send texts through such animals as pigeons, snails and penguins, reported reaching 650,000 downloads this month.
Both apps have connected with users who are tired of daily digital drudgery.
“I was probably inspired by the trend going on in tech — people wanting to get away from their phones and go outside,” Mr. Iarrobino, 29, said of how he came to it. “I thought carrier pigeons were a funny concept and it would be funny if some of them didn’t come back.”
Mr. Iarrobino, a software engineer in New York, has developed other apps: One that charges users 99 cents each time they snooze an alarm, and another that keeps a leaderboard of users who touch their phone screen the most in a day.
The first message he sent on Carrier Pidge was to a friend in Chicago – a picture of Danny DeVito in a leotard from the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Delivery time: 8 hours and 49 minutes.
The speed of each report varies, with a top speed of 110 mph (Mr. Iarrobino said he researched racing pigeons and found one named Bolt that was recorded at that speed.)
Roost was designed by Logan Mendelsohn, a 31-year-old product manager. Unlike Carrier Pidge, the app offers over 1,000 animals to choose from, with speeds to match. (The white Italian snail crawls at just over one mile per hour, while the barn owl flies at about 20 miles per hour) It has a “writer” feature that allows users to meet and message new people.
“I’m focused on the slow tech movement, the areas that help connect people all over the world,” said Mr. Mendelsohn, whose career has focused on trust and security in technology. He said Roost has gotten so big that he plans to hire staff.
Roost fans accusing Carrier Pidge of copying the concept have raised some flags in online comment sections. But Mr. Mendelsohn and Mr. Iarrobino said in interviews that neither took ideas from the other and that they discussed their applications together.
Their apps seem to have gotten into a palpable discomfort with screen time and constant communication and longing for an outdated era.
And 2023 overview Conducted by the Harris Poll in collaboration with the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, it found that 80 percent of Gen Z adults — those born after 1997 — worried that their age group was relying too much on technology. 58 percent said that new technologies tend to separate people rather than bring them together.
“Many of the digital tools that saturate our attention right now were built on the idea that friction is bad,” Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of “Deep Work,” said in an email.
“The human brain cannot function well in a frictionless world,” he said. “Too much information coming at us too quickly overwhelms our ability to switch our attention.”
By reintroducing spawning through apps like Carrier Pidge and Roost, Mr. Newport said, messages can be thoughtful and given the attention they deserve.
Ema Siddique, 28, deleted most of her social media accounts about five years ago after wondering if being constantly available meant her most important contacts weren’t being cared for enough. When she learned about Carrier Pidge, she saw it as a natural extension of that mindset.
Her pigeon was one that traveled from London, where she lives, to a friend in Toronto (she uses the app to message another friend who lives in Kuwait). Mrs. Siddique and her friends don’t take the lyrics too seriously, but they quickly start using ancient, “Bridgertonian” language, referring to each other as “my dearest lady.”
“It’s like a letter in the sense that you put a lot of effort into it, and you feel like every word that goes into it is intentional,” Ms Siddique said.
She added: “You can watch it, which adds to the excitement. I’ve got one Carrier Pidge on the way from Kuwait and you’re like, ‘What’s she going to say in the next one?’