The Intimate Apps That Make Me Feel Closer When I'm Thousands of Miles Away
Embracing the tracking apps I rely on to keep me in sync with my loved ones
There aren’t many apps I’m thrilled to use every day.
I’m on Slack, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Discord, and LinkedIn daily, performing traditional social media activities like following and consuming content from many (ballpark 1,000-5,000) people who I care varying degrees about. But I can’t exactly say that I’m happy to be there.
The only apps that I really enjoy using lately are Swarm, Goodreads, Strava (I’m a recent convert from Runkeeper, so won’t cover it today) and BeReal. On these apps, I follow no more than 10 people I would call if I needed a kidney transplant—just a few people that I really care a lot about.
These apps give me a river of small data points about myself and the people I love.
And they typically have two attributes:
First, they are designed for personal performance logging and record-keeping. Even if they had zero social features, they perform an archival function for the hobbies that nourish me—for me, that’s reading, sports, and exploring new places. Gamified features and ritualistic updates and summaries help pat me on the back when I’ve accomplished my fastest-ever run or keep me on track while I’m chipping away at my to-be-read list. They show me where I’ve been, and how far I’ve come.
Secondly, they’re just a little bit social, even though the intrinsic value of the app is not reliant on being voyeuristic or consuming the output of others.
On these intimate social apps, the content is just a steady trickle of what I’m actually doing in my daily life—all of the mundane things, like grocery shopping and taking the metro. It’s drip after drip of the stuff that happens in between all of the beauty and drama of major life updates on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Of course, having my closest friends using these apps improves my experience (no one needs me to mention that network effects work). I can lap up my loved ones’ book recommendations, cheer them on for breakthrough mileage, and know exactly when they finally made it to my favorite boutique in Edinburgh.
But I would probably still use these platforms for solo tracking, even if I was just posting into the void.
Here are the ones I use most:
Swarm
The only app I use every day without even a twinge of self-loathing is Swarm, the geolocation and check-in “personal lifelog” spinoff of Foursquare. The tagline is “Remember everywhere,” and it delivers.
In 2019, when I was moving to Berlin, one of my best friends, a diehard Swarm-er, asked how I was going to remember everything.
Good question! I assumed my compulsive need to take iPhone photos of everything would be enough? Nope; Swarm is better.
The user flow is as follows: The app opens, and I see a simplistic feed of my friends’ most recent check-ins. The primary action I can take on the app is to Check-In, responding to the prompt “Where Are You?” I can heart or comment on the check-ins of the people I follow, and I can tag others who were there with me. I also have an aggregate map of all of the check-ins I’ve ever done.
I have exactly 11 friends on Swarm.
We check in everywhere, even if and especially when it’s not glamorous—work, the pharmacy when we’re resupplying shampoo or tampons, the gym, train stations, hiking trails, local parks, and every cafe, restaurant, gallery, or bar we encounter in every city.
It’s how I know when Eleanor and her boyfriend, Jeff, are on a road trip for a long weekend. They refueled their car at a rural rest stop and popped by a small town’s general store. It’s how I knew when Carolyn was finally released from 21-day quarantine in Hong Kong, or that Peter was working from the office instead of from home last week.
I love seeing where they are. It warms my heart to know that two friends, one who lives in London and another in San Francisco, who haven’t seen each other since before the pandemic, caught up over dinner IRL for the first time in years. It lets me know when to send the text asking my friend how it went when she met her new partner’s parents for the first time. Or how a first day at a new job was.
It also helps me keep a clear and exhaustive record of where I’ve been. When I saw my 2021 year-end summary from my first eight months in Paris (I arrived late March 2021, amid the final pandemic lockdown), I teared up. I had been to 577 New Places that year (screen at the top of this post). It was a record of the routine I built in my adoptive city check-in by check-in, and gave me a moment to appreciate that my life here was normalizing and starting to feel like home.
Goodreads
I’ve used very rudimentary book trackers (RIP Bookling) for years to help me set annual reading goals, keep myself honest against them, and think about any annual trends in what I’m consuming. No social features, no discovery, just a progress bar that would fill when I updated from page 10 of 352 to 25 of 352. Unfortunately, that’s not a sustainable business, so when Bookling shut down, I transitioned to Goodreads as a late-adopter.
Goodreads is a monopoly books app (for the gamers out there, Steam is a fair comp) that countless media startups have tried to dethrone. The UX/UI is busted and the discovery experience is almost unnavigable, but no one cares, because it has everything you expect and want.
It does exactly what I need it to: catalogs my to-be-read list, tracks what I’m currently reading, shows me reviews, and keeps a record of books I’ve already read and what I thought of them.
It’s an added benefit to see what my friends are reading and discover my next favorite book from their 5* reviews.
It also helps me understand where they are spiritually and emotionally—which new parent friends gave Twelve Hours’ Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old bad reviews (2*, kid still isn’t sleeping) or who needs extra support while they’re wading through a breakup and weeping to Tiny, Beautiful Things.
While the app isn’t explicitly social, it helps me identify who I can talk to instead of just trawling through Twitter search for post-read analysis. Goodreads updates show me which of my friends just read the buzzy literary fiction of the moment (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Lessons in Chemistry), who will book club Rebecca with me for spooky season, and who can steer me toward a history or economics book that isn’t the text version of five vague PowerPoint slides on #innovation and #thefuture.
BeReal
BeReal touches on each of the categories I mentioned (a day-by-day log that’s also a little social), but I do think it leans more social than archival, and I honestly might forget about it completely if it weren’t for the iconic daily notification (⚠️It’s Time to BeReal!⚠️). As an aside, BeReal is a master class in product-led growth and notification strategy; my favorite of its notifications is the one that tells me that my friends have posted but blurs their dispatches until I post too.
I’ve read countless analyses about the authenticity drive underpinning BeReal’s success, about the reactionary pendulum swing all the way back from the polished curation we endure on Instagram. And that’s true! That’s partially what appeals to me, but not precisely.
I love seeing one moment every day where my friends are just existing. When they’re bored at work, lingering in bed with the lights off, hungover eating a BEC, or watching Netflix with their partners.
I like it because it captures a small percentage of the stuff that we rarely text each other about anymore. It’s the stuff we all forget to say when someone asks, “How was your day?”
It helps me feel close, like I’m there too.
Some of this is growing up and some of this is moving away, but the friends I follow on these apps are the ones who I used to see every few days in our 20s when we all lived in the same place. Who used to watch Netflix with me. Who used to sit with me at a cafe while I side-hustled on a Saturday afternoon. When we were debriefing the night before together over Lenny’s sandwiches.
Moving away means catching up less often, but for longer periods of time. It’s scheduling a call for an hour catch-up. It’s getting a lot of big updates, but not often the in-between moments that seem trivial to report to someone whose voice you haven’t heard in weeks. Like, does anyone really need to know that the metro was extra-crowded this morning and I was on the brink of a breakdown while I was pressed up against the glass doors?
Like no, but also absolutely yes.
Because in between the big moments, the small, trivial, just-hanging-out-and-peacefully-coexisting moments formed the bedrock of my close friendships in the first place.
And I’m so grateful that, in a roundabout way, these apps help close the distance and time gap between my friends who are now scattered around the world—in San Francisco, New York, London, Zurich, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin, or me here in Paris.
They make me feel like I’m present for all of those small moments again, that we’re together, even when we’re not consciously on a call. It’s just us checking in.
Leave a comment if there are any other apps you love that fill this need—or if you want me to DM you my handle on any of these so we can follow each other!