Letterway
Notes
Working notes on what we are building and why. Design decisions, the reasoning behind them, and the places we might be wrong.
· 6 min read
A pen-pal app for Android where letters take real time
Letterway is now free on Google Play. A pen-pal app where a letter crosses real distance at 380 km/h — half an hour across a city, two days across the world.
· 8 min read
How long does a letter take? Distance is the whole answer
How long does a letter take in Letterway? Between 30 minutes and about two days. The formula, a table of real routes, and how it compares to real post.
· 8 min read
MapLibre draws a blank map in Next.js, and the worker URL is why
A bundler rewrites import.meta.url to a file:// path, MapLibre's worker URL resolves to an empty string, and new Worker('') loads your own HTML. Here is the fix.
· 9 min read
What to write in your first letter to a pen pal
A first letter should be about one page. Here is what to put on it, what to leave out, the questions worth asking, and a full worked example you can borrow.
· 4 min read
Why a letter should take time to arrive
Every letter in Letterway travels at 380 km/h. You cannot pay to make it faster. Here is the reasoning behind the one rule the whole app rests on.
· 4 min read
Read receipts, but only for reading
Looking at a letter should be private. Reading it should not. How the wax seal in Letterway separates the two, and why that distinction is the whole feature.
· 4 min read
We drew the map ourselves
A stock map SDK would have made Letterway look like every other app. So the small maps are drawn from Natural Earth data, and the big ones are OpenStreetMap.
· 3 min read
Being ghosted is a design problem
The most common complaint about pen-pal apps is people who stop replying. Some of that is human. A lot of it is made by a reverse-chronological inbox.