Somewhere over the Great Plains, a virtual woodpecker is on his way to Alaska to send a message to my anonymous friend. At the same time, a zebra finch named Tucker flies to Manhattan to send a friend of mine his lousy doodle Cool S.
These messages take hours or even days to be sent, depending on how far the bird has to fly, as that is the point Perchthe viral “slow-cial” app that makes homing pigeons cool again. Roost arrives at a time when people crave the opportunity to slow down and disconnect from apps that constantly demand their attention and embrace technology that adds friction.
“Everything on a phone is instantaneous these days — every single thing you do, it’s like you’re always getting a notification or something,” Roost creator Logan Mendelsohn told TechCrunch. “[Roost] it’s kind of a break from the moment. It resonates with people in a way that they don’t feel pressured all the time to do something.”
When you sign up for Roost, you choose four birds to add to your rookery, which allows you to message your friends on the app.
Each bird moves at the speed it travels in real life, so a hawk will send a message much faster than a hummingbird. (Yes, not every bird is a homing pigeon, but including other species makes your bird collection and your friends’ birds more interesting.) If you really want to slow things down, you can send snails or turtles.
A senior product manager for trust and security at Ticketmaster, Mendelsohn started building Roost as a fun project to use with his friends, but they liked the app so much that they encouraged him to publish it on the App Store.
Mendelssohn’s friends thought of something. The app developed a very small niche audience, but began to grow exponentially when a mother posted in the threads about how her daughter communicated with her friends in Elizabethan English on an app that sends messages at the speed of real birds.
Within three days of this publication, the app grew from 10,000 to 100,000 users. Now, about five weeks later, Roost is about to hit 300,000 users.
“The people are what really make this platform, and what people kept talking about is how healthy it is and how whimsical it is, and how it really helps them be more intentional about what they’re saying to people,” Mendelsohn said. “There’s a lot less pressure when you know the message isn’t immediately going to someone who I think really resonates with the user base.”
As a trust and security professional by day, Mendelsohn knows that any social platform—even his innocent birding app—has the potential to be abused. So, by default, only a user’s city is shared with their friends. However, you can choose to manually enable a “close friends” feature to share your exact location with specific people.
“I personally think that for any new platform that connects people, trust and security should be the first thing they think about,” Mendelsohn said. “When you can start from scratch with that lens, then you can build it into the platform instead of doing it later.”
Privacy concerns were also top of mind when Mendelsohn created the “Pen Pals” feature, which lets you exchange messages with anonymous users in your age group. When you enter the feature, you are explicitly warned not to give out your real contact information or personal information. The app intentionally doesn’t support photo sharing yet, as Mendelsohn wants to build more sophisticated content moderation tools first.
Given the sheer size and scope of Roost — did we mention there are minigames? — Not surprisingly, Mendelsohn used the Claude Code throughout its development. But the kind of people who flock to Roost tend to be people who are tired of the state of the tech industry, which has driven them to seek out a “slow media” app.
Soon, Mendelsohn began receiving an onslaught of complaints from people who were disappointed to learn that he was using AI-generated art for the bird images.
“On the AI art side, I totally understood the feedback. I won’t lie, it was scary to see the reaction online, [but] I don’t think it’s productive to dig in your heels when your community is vocal about something they care about,” he said. “At the same time, I also knew I couldn’t flip a switch overnight. Replacing art in an app of this size takes time, planning and money.”
Mendelsohn’s resources are limited as he continues to work on Roost in his spare time. It has no external funding and the app only generates revenue from in-app purchases such as extra birds. To address user concerns about the use of artificial intelligence, it is now running a contest that will allow artists to contribute artistically. While this has satisfied the complaints for now, the situation reflects a growing tension in the consumer app space. Many users now boycott AI art out of respect for the artists, but the situation with Roost’s coded vibe app shows that the situation isn’t always cut and dry.
“As a solo founder, I don’t think I could build and sustain something at this scale without AI-assisted development, but every product decision and direction for Roost still comes from me and the community,” he said.
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