BondieOpen beta, both stores, free
Land on their home screen before they unlock the phone.
Take a photo, pick who gets it, and it is already sitting on their widget. There is a feed too, and only the people you let in are ever on it.
Free, and you can walk out whenever you like.
Two squares wide, holding the newest photo you were sent.
Two minutes and you are in.
Three things, in this order. The second one is the one people skip and then wonder why nothing happens.
- 1
Get the app
On Android, tap Become a tester and it installs from Play like anything else.
On iPhone you need TestFlight first. Grab it, come back here, tap again.
- 2
Put the widget on your home screen
Long press an empty patch, find Bondie, drag the big one out. Skipping this is skipping the whole app.
Say yes to notifications while you are there. A widget cannot fetch anything by itself, so the notification is what wakes the app up to redraw it. Say no and it only changes when you open the app, which feels exactly like a broken app.
- 3
Drag someone in with you
Bondie is gloriously pointless alone. Send your invite link, they accept, and from then on you can ambush each other mid-commute.
A free account holds twenty friends, which is more than most people can name.
Now go and break it.
You are not here to be polite about it. You are here to find the thing we walked past a hundred times.
Found something? It takes a minute.
A short form opens right inside Discord. Nothing to sign up for, nowhere else to go. It becomes a real tracked issue the second you send it, and we tag you in the thread when it dies.
Where it usually goes wrong
Roughly in order of how much trouble each one causes us.
- The locked phone trickSend a photo while their phone is face down, locked, app closed. The widget should just quietly change. If they have to open anything, tell us. This is the hardest thing we do.
- Terrible signalSend with the network off. Get in a lift. Come back out. Did the photo make it, or did it vanish without a word?
- Adding peopleTry it both ways, your invite link and searching a username, and see which one a friend can follow without you on the phone.
- The feedLike something. Leave a comment. Then slide into a private thread about it without ever leaving the screen.
- Anything that looks wrongText cut in half, a button somewhere silly, a colour fighting everything near it. Screenshot it. Your screen is probably a size we have never held.
- The way outDelete your account from inside the app and watch it take everything with it. Please do this one last.
How to write one we can actually fix
It comes down to a single question: can we make it happen again on our own phones?
The unglamorous promises.
Short version: your photos go to your friends and nowhere near a stranger.
Your feed is the people you added and nobody else. No discovery, no suggestions, no algorithm deciding a stranger ought to meet you. Both sides say yes before a single photo moves.
Settings, then Delete account. Your profile and every photo you ever sent go with it. The privacy policy spells out the rest without the fog.
Go and put yourself on someone's home screen.