Adrift
A message in a bottle.
Without the bottle.
Write something. Seal it. Stand beside real water and let it go.
It will drift through the world until somebody, somewhere, finds it.
Free. No ads. No followers. Nothing thrown into the sea.
Keep the mystery.
Lose the litter.
For hundreds of years, people have put messages in bottles and thrown them into the water.
It's a wonderful idea.
The bottle isn't.
Adrift recreates the mystery without putting another piece of glass, plastic, cork or paper into the sea.
The message goes into the water.
Nothing else does.
A phone and a server both cost something to run, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What Adrift removes is the part that washes up on a beach twenty years later.
One
Go to
the water
Adrift only works beside real water. Your phone has to be there, not just you.
Take something you want to put into the world and go to the sea.
No pretending from the sofa. Adrift starts at the water's edge.
Two
Put something inside
A thought.
A photograph.
Something worth finding.
If it wouldn't fit inside a real bottle, it doesn't belong in Adrift.
That is the whole test. A bottle holds a sheet of paper and a photograph, so that is what Adrift holds. Nothing to play, nothing to tap through, nowhere else to be sent.
Three
Let it go
You wrote it. You sealed it. Now it isn't yours to steer.
Your bottle is out there with everybody else's.
You just can't tell which one is yours.
Neither can anybody else.
Adrift leaves your own bottles off your own map, so you can't find yours by working out what's missing. Everyone else's are there, placed to the nearest few tens of kilometres, which is nowhere near close enough to go and look.
Four
The water decides
Currents, coastlines and time decide what happens next.
It might travel for days.
It might travel for months.
It might wash up somewhere you have never been.
Bottles aren't sent to people.
You don't get to choose.
Movement is shaped by real coastlines and a simulated field of ocean movement. The coastlines are real data; the drift is not a forecast and not a scientific model of real currents. This picture is drawn rather than observed: nobody watches a bottle move, including the person who threw it.
Around the world
The ocean
right now
Somewhere out there.
You don't know where the bottles out there are.
Neither do the people who threw them.
That's the point.
Once a bottle is released, nobody gets to track it. Not even the person who threw it.
Five
Something
washed up
Open Adrift when you're by the water.
If a bottle is nearby, go and get it.
Finding takes the same walk as throwing. You have to be there too.
Nearby
One bottle in the water
40 m
Nobody receives a bottle.
Someone has to find it.
Six
Keep it.
Or let it go again.
Read what's inside.
Keep it, and its journey ends with you.
Or add something of your own, take it back to the water and let it go again.
A bottle that keeps being thrown back keeps collecting people. The one you find may have been in three pairs of hands before yours.
Not another social network.
- No followers.
- No likes.
- No feed.
- No algorithm deciding what you should see.
- No engagement scores.
Just people, water and whatever happens to wash ashore.
Everyone gets
the same ocean.
Adrift is free, and there are no ads in it.
- No ads.
- No paid boosts.
- No promoted bottles.
- No paying to reach more people.
- No algorithm selling your attention.
Nobody's bottle travels further, gets found sooner or reaches more people because they paid for it. The water treats every one of them the same.
Money should never make the ocean unfair.
The app
Screen
by screen
The whole app, in the order you would meet it.
Captured on an iPhone against the live backend. The distances and place names are real: coastline from OpenStreetMap, not fixtures.
Onboarding
Adrift only works at the edge of the water.
Water
At the water: eligible, and the place named broadly.
Compose
What are you putting inside?
Compose
A note that fits in a bottle. One photograph, optionally.
Seal
Sealed. This cannot be changed now.
Release
It’s gone. No position, no distance, no destination.
Water
Something is in the water. A distance, and never a direction.
Find
A number that gets smaller. That is the whole interaction.
Collection
A bottle of yours, still out there. One word and a date is all there is.
Collection
What you have found, and what you did with it.
Ocean
Anonymous bottles, snapped to a 28 km grid. Your own are never on it.
Settings
Free, no ads, no subscription. Deleting an account is offered plainly.
Leave a message.
Not a trace.
A real message in a bottle has always had one awkward requirement: you have to throw something into the water.
Adrift keeps the ritual and removes that part.
Write it.
Release it.
Let the ocean decide.
Nothing physical needs to be left behind.
Go to the water.
There are things out there waiting to be found.
And things that haven't been written yet.
Free. Ad-free. Built for people, not engagement.