You know that friend who takes so long to reply that you could send a carrier pigeon, wait for the pigeon to find a mate, build a nest and raise three emotionally complicated children, and you’d still probably hear back around the same time? Roost has decided this is a perfectly good way to communicate. The social app created by Logan Mendelsohn, a senior product manager at Ticketmaster, started out as a silly side project he made for his friends. They liked it enough to convince him to put it on the App Store. It launched in April, picked up serious steam in June, and has now grown to around five lakh users.
The premise is wonderfully silly. Every message you send is carried by a virtual bird that flies across a real map to reach whoever you have sent it to. When you first join, you get to choose four birds for your rookery, with the option to collect more later. Each bird moves at the speed of its real-life counterpart, so a falcon will get there considerably faster than a hummingbird. I chose an Indian peafowl, a common loon, a great horned owl, and a snow goose. The peafowl travels at around 16 kmph, but I chose it because who would not want a gorgeous peafowl with its ridiculous, pretty wings to fly over and deliver them a message? If one actually landed outside my window carrying a tiny note, I would probably lose my mind.
Once you have your flock, you can send messages to friends, invite people onto the app or head into the Pen Pal section to find strangers to write to. Personally, I found the pen pal bit far more fun than sending a bird to someone I could easily WhatsApp anyway. You can choose someone from your own country or anywhere in the world, with matches based on things like age and shared interests. You also get to fill out little prompts on your profile, like “What made you really happy recently?” or “What could you talk about forever?” and a potential pen pal gets a tiny preview of your personality before deciding, yes, I would like to send this person a bird.
Roost also covers the important business of keeping your birds entertained. You can train them through mini-games, including Flappy Pigeon, a nod to the great touchscreen tormentor of our youth, and Bullet Hell, where you dodge attacks and battle bosses. There is also a Tamagotchi-like Care feature, where you can groom your birds, give them baths, and generally behave like the extremely attentive parent of a small digital bird. Training can make your birds faster, which means your messages get there sooner.
Gopal Sathe, 42, a newsroom development lead based in London, has been using Roost for about a month and has already roped several friends into it. “People start off with ‘This is dumb’ and then they’re like, okay, it’s kind of fun,” he laughs. He uses Roost for the same friends he speaks to on WhatsApp, but the conversations take on a different shape. For the slower catchups, Sathe says, he has been turning to Roost.
But the Pen Pal feature has taken him into an even stranger little corner of the internet. “I had installed this thinking I’m going to just message my friends, but it asks you to fill out your interests, so I did that.” He added Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, and then the messages started arriving. “I’m a big fan of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. So, I put that on and quite randomly people started messaging saying, okay, so I’ve been reading this book of his and I’ve been reading that. What do you think of this?” He now has individual conversations with people in Germany, France, and Italy. “I’m an Indian, and all four of us are bonding by talking about this dead British author.”
The privacy part makes the whole stranger-pen-pal thing feel considerably less like the beginning of a true-crime documentary. Your city is visible, but your exact location and phone number stay private. Roost has also recently introduced a paid subscription, starting at around ₹95, which allows you to buy more birds for your rookery, collect verification badges for your profile, and gain early access to new features.
I’ve already sent a message to someone in Tokyo. I told them I had just finished Uzumaki by Junji Ito and asked for other niche manga recommendations. If I can outsource my reading list to a stranger in Tokyo via a snow goose, I consider that a successful use of technology.
