Letterway is on Google Play from today. It is free, there is no advertising, and it is the same account as the web — if you have letters in the air right now, they are in the app the moment you sign in.
This is what it is, and what the app adds.
What Letterway is
A pen-pal app where a letter takes real time to cross real distance. You write to someone on the other side of the world, the letter leaves, and it arrives about a day later. In between there is nothing to do, which is the point.
A letter that has landed. The stamp and the postmark come from where it was written.
Everything in the product follows from the delay. You cannot see whether somebody is typing, because nobody is typing at you. There are no read receipts on delivery — only on reading, which is a different promise. A correspondence is a handful of letters a week at most, so it stays worth reading.
Why an app, when the web already works
Because a letter arrives when you are not looking at it.
That sounds obvious and it is the whole reason this build exists. A letter from the other side of the world lands roughly 26 hours after it was sent, which is almost never a moment you happen to be sitting on the website. On the web you found out the next time you thought to check. The app tells you: once when a letter is on its way, and again when it lands.
The Post: what is coming, and how long it has left.
Nothing else changes. Same account, same correspondences, same stamps. If you would rather stay in a browser, stay in a browser — the only thing you give up is being told.
How long a letter takes
Two constants and one variable:
travel time = 30 minutes + ( distance in km ÷ 380 km/h )
| Route | Distance | Arrives in |
|---|---|---|
| Across one city | 0 km | 30 minutes |
| Islamabad → Lahore | 270 km | 1.2 hours |
| London → New York | 5,600 km | 15.2 hours |
| Tokyo → Berlin | 8,900 km | 23.9 hours |
| London → Melbourne | 16,900 km | 45.0 hours |
Nothing else moves that number. Not what you paid, not how long the letter is, not who you are. The full arithmetic, the great-circle maths and a longer table are in how long does a letter take, and the argument for having a delay at all is in why a letter should take time to arrive.
While it is in the air you can watch it.
The Atlas. We drew this map ourselves, for reasons that turned out to be mostly about labels.
Stamps, which are the part nobody expects
The first time somebody in a new country writes to you, their country leaves a stamp behind. You cannot buy them and there is no shop. They only arrive by correspondence, which means a full album is a record of who wrote to you rather than what you spent.
Each country's stamp is cut from a formula seeded by its own code, so no two are alike.
What it costs
Nothing. There is no subscription, no advertising, and nothing to buy in the app today. If that changes, the things that already work will keep working — the delay, the map, the stamps and the letters are the product, not a trial of it.
What Letterway does not do
Worth saying plainly, because most of these are the reason people leave other apps:
- No advertising. Not now, not later.
- No read receipts on delivery. You are told when your letter is opened, not when it lands on the doormat.
- No typing indicators, no last-seen, no online dot. None of it means anything when a reply takes a day.
- No city, ever. Pen pals see your country and roughly how far away you are. Never where you live.
- No ranking you by how much you use it. Being away for a fortnight is not a failure state — being ghosted is a design problem, and we would rather fix the design.
Questions people ask
Is Letterway free?
Yes. Free on Google Play and free on the web, with no advertising. There is nothing to buy in the app today.
Is there an iPhone app?
Not yet. Letterway runs in full in any mobile browser, so an iPhone works — you just do not get the notification when a letter lands.
How long does a letter take to arrive?
Between 30 minutes and about 53 hours. A letter travels 380 km/h after half an hour of handling, so distance is the only thing that decides it. A letter across your own city takes 30 minutes; the longest journey possible on Earth takes 2.2 days.
Do I need the app, or can I use Letterway in a browser?
Everything works in a browser. The app adds one thing the web cannot do: it tells you the moment a letter arrives, instead of waiting for you to check.
How do you find pen pals on Letterway?
Discover shows people who are open to a first letter, with their country, the topics they write about and how often they reply. You pick someone and write. There is no matching algorithm and no swiping.
Can I see whether someone actually replies before I write to them?
Yes. Every profile shows a reply rate, counted from first letters over the last six months. Nobody is hidden from Discover for having a low one — you just get to see it before you spend an hour writing.
Start with one letter
You need an address and about ten minutes, which is roughly how long it takes a letter to reach the next town. If you are staring at the blank page, we wrote a guide to what to say in a first letter.
Get Letterway on Google Play, or start writing on the web — it is the same account either way.