Dating app · iOS · API live on Railway

Ghostn't

Name: Ghostn't
Author: Alexus Karl Joaquin

The dating app where ghosting is impossible. One hour a night, answers before faces, then you both choose: hold or cut.

Founder, sole engineer & designer · 2026 · Designed, built and deployed by Alexus Karl Joaquin.

Window

1 hour / night

Lines

max 3

Reveal

3-night ladder

Backend

Express + WS

What I built

A product with real rules: the room opens for one hour a night (Asia/Manila), one answered question is your ticket in, you pick people by their answers, and held lines climb a reveal ladder: voices, first names, then faces. Miss two nights and the line flatlines. Three lines max.
Live chat over WebSockets with heartbeat reaping, server-authoritative countdowns (clock skew measured on every API call), and in-app calls with native CallKit integration.
Backend built for cost and speed: one pg pool with statement timeouts, every endpoint a single round-trip (CTEs, lateral joins, no N+1), keyset pagination, partial indexes, advisory locks to serialize competing line-opens, per-user rate buckets.
Frontend performance baked in: route-level code splitting (1–5 KB per screen), system font stack, sockets only while a line is alive, GPU-friendly animations with reduced-motion support.
Shipped through the same headless App Store pipeline as Cashn't: automated provisioning, archive, export and upload. Demo personas keep the room alive for App Review.