Letterfly: Letters to Friends

There’s a small joy in finding a letter in your mailbox. You know the handwriting, you turn the envelope over, you open it, and for a moment it’s just you and the person who wrote it.

Letterfly brings that feeling to the messages of the people you love. Their words don’t pop up as one more notification: they land in your mailbox, in an envelope, and wait for you to open them.

OPEN IT LIKE A LETTER
• Letters that have landed wait for you in a bundle. Open it, turn each envelope over and slide the letter opener under the flap.
• The letter unfolds on your desk, in the handwriting its writer chose. Read it sheet by sheet, and look closer with two fingers.
• Its instant photos come out first, and some letters hide stamps.
• Every letter is kept in a box for the two of you, the newest on top, ready to be read again.

WRITE BACK ON REAL PAPER
• Some twenty papers: letter paper, a postcard, a sticky note, kraft paper, crumpled paper, the back of a receipt…
• About thirty pens and handwritings, from a fountain pen to a felt tip.
• Add photos that come out as instant prints, stickers and rubber stamps, a drawing, or your voice on a cassette.
• A few words or several pages: it’s your letter.

A LITTLE JOURNEY
• Your letter folds into a paper plane and flies to your friend’s city on the map. Follow it in the sky, and watch theirs fly toward you.
• A home-screen widget shows the plane on its way to you, and the letter waiting to be opened.
• Choose the day it lands, for a birthday or a big day.

FRIENDS, FAMILY, AND YOU
• Write to one friend, or to a group of up to 12: the family, your oldest friends.
• Write to your future self: a time capsule, sealed until the date you choose, up to ten years ahead. Nobody can open it before then, not even you.
• Invite the people who aren’t on Letterfly yet: they get a text with the link, and your letter flies to them as soon as they join.
• Letterfly is on Android, and letters fly between phones of every kind, so everyone you love can write back.

PLUMY AND STAMPS
• Plumy, the dove postmaster, welcomes you with a first letter and shows you around. As you level up, his parcels bring secret papers and surprises.
• Stamps are Letterfly’s currency. Some fall out of the letters you open, others reward your quests and each friend who joins, and packs of stamps are available as in-app purchases. They pay for extras such as Express flights, envelopes, plane paints and some handwritings.

GOOD TO KNOW
• Friends, with their consent: letters from someone new wait in your Requests until you accept them. You can decline, block or report.
• Seal a letter if you like: it’s end-to-end encrypted, and only your friend’s phone can read it.
• Your address book stays on your phone: only fingerprints of phone numbers are compared.
• No ads, no tracking. Your friends see your city, never your exact location.
• Delete your account and your letters from the app at any time.
• Letterfly speaks English and French, and is for people aged 13 and over.

OUR STORY
We were two, writing to each other a bit like letters. Opening a message from the other always felt like finding a letter in the mailbox, so we made Letterfly just for the two of us. Then we wanted to share it with you.

See you soon in your mailbox.

Recent changes:
Letterfly becomes a messaging app… in letters: your conversations look like a messaging app's, each opens as a thread, and the feather waits at the bottom to write. Write to several people at once, or make a group. And everything is redrawn: the papers, 7 of them new, envelopes, stamps, 11 pens each with its own ink, new stickers, and origami planes and butterflies. And fixes so nothing closes by itself.