Miles Apart: Couples App

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Miles Apart app icon, 1024 × 1024

Inspiration

This project started because two of the three people on our team are in long-distance relationships. For me, it was especially personal. I had just started dating someone I really liked, but she lived in LA and I was in SF. Over the summer, while we were missing each other, we started building Miles Apart and I began testing it with her.

That ended up being the best validation we could have asked for. We started having better conversations, doing little virtual date nights, sending each other things through the app, and actually looking forward to our daily challenge.

We’re on a 54 day streak now going strong!

What it does

Miles Apart gives long-distance couples little things to do together every day.

There’s a daily challenge where both people share a photo and answer questions that range from fun and random to more meaningful. We also built quizzes, mini-games, love letters, mystery boxes, a shared pet, a relationship map, a shared calendar, widgets, and a plant that grows with your streak.

A lot of it is intentionally playful with deep rooted meaning. You can send your partner a love letter by carrier pigeon, take care of a frog together, or answer questions you probably would never randomly bring up on FaceTime. But this all together, creates sparks and conversations that are pivotal to a relationship's success!

The goal is simple: Help a couple that's miles apart grow closer.

How we built it

We built Miles Apart for both iOS and Android, with a lot of help from Codex and Claude code for coding and debugging. I designed directly in Canva and using GPT image generation, then used Gemini video models and Seedance to create animations. It was a lot of making something, testing it on our phones, and tweaking it until it felt right. The hardest part was getting features to work between two partners, especially when they’re on different phones. Pairing, shared drawings, streaks, and keeping answers hidden until both people finish all took a lot of back-and-forth testing.

Challenges we ran into

Testing was harder than we expected because so many features need two people interacting back and forth. A lot of bugs only showed up when both accounts were doing things at the same time.

Time zones were another big one. We had to think carefully about what today's challenge meant when a couple could be hours apart but still shares the same streak and daily challenge.

This was also our first time doing a lot of animation. Getting the pet to jump, eat, sleep, react, and transition smoothly took a lot more trial and error than we expected, but it was also one of the most fun parts to build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing I’m most proud of is that we actually use it ourselves.

It is easy to build something that looks good in screenshots. It is a lot more meaningful when you open it every day with your own partner and it actually creates conversations, little jokes, and moments you probably would not have had otherwise.

Seeing our own streak keep growing made the project feel very real.

What we learned

This was our first time building a freemium product, so we learned a lot about deciding what should stay free and what actually feels valuable enough to pay for.

It was also my first time coding this heavily with AI. I learned how to best express my ideas and thoughts, how to execute on my vision and experiment with designing directly with code through prompting.

It also gave me a much better understanding of everything happening behind the UI. I usually think visually first, so it was really interesting seeing how much logic sits behind something that looks simple on screen.