{"$schema":"https://ejfox.com/schema/page-twin@1.json","kind":"project","url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paperclip","json_url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paperclip.json","generator":"ejfox.com/json-twin@1","data":{"cacheVersion":"2026-05-13-gear-cards","html":"

No chat. Just vibes.

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paperclip is a friends-only presence app: you broadcast your vibe with a single emoji and that's the whole thing. There's no feed to scroll, no chat thread, no likes or follower counts or read receipts — none of the machinery that turns \"how are my friends doing\" into a job. You pick an emoji, your friends see it, and when theirs changes you can get a quiet notification. That's it. I wanted the ambient warmth of knowing what your people are feeling without any of the pressure to perform or respond.

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It's built native on both platforms — SwiftUI on iOS, Jetpack Compose on Android — over a shared Supabase backend that syncs in real time, so an emoji you set on your iPhone shows up on your friend's Android in seconds. It's monochrome on purpose: the only color on the screen is the emoji itself, which is exactly where I want your eye to go. Friends join by invite code, there's no public anything, and I built the boring-but-real parts too — push notifications with mute and quiet hours, block/report and account deletion for the App Store, a Cloudflare Worker proxy, even a Discord bot that mirrors your friends' emoji board into a server and Siri Shortcuts so you can set your vibe by voice.

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I built it with AI help (Claude), which is how one person ships two native apps and a backend at all — but the shape of it, the ruthless subtraction, the decision that the anti-social-network should feel like a piece of paper and not a dashboard, that's mine. Deliberately styled to lean Apple, not startup. Just pushing it steadily forward like a boss.

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\n\"paperclip\n
paperclip — one-emoji friends-only presence
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\n\"A\n
A friend's contact card — pinned emoji, notifications, and a scrolling emoji history
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","title":"paperclip","metadata":{"title":"paperclip","date":"2025-11-01T05:00:00.000Z","category":"Apps","featured":false,"tech":["Swift","SwiftUI","Kotlin","Jetpack Compose","Supabase"],"state":"deployed","ai-involvement":"ai-assisted","tags":["ios","android","app","social"],"words":301,"images":2,"imageDetails":{"total":2,"cloudinary":2,"withDimensions":0},"links":0,"codeBlocks":0,"headers":{},"toc":[],"type":"post"}},"_links":{"self":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paperclip.json","html":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paperclip","index":"/projects.json"}}