I had to survive in a long-distance relationship so I created an app to help me

Allegro Federico
4 min readNov 25, 2020

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They said Love is blind. I can confirm that.

One day, unexpectedly, it just happened. I met the girl of my life ❤️… But not in Venice, which is where I come from. Not even in Italy. I met her during a trip. In Vancouver. Over 9,000km from home.

F**k!

That was the beginning of my long-distance relationship. I stayed in Vancouver for a couple of months. Just the time to realize that she was not just a paragraph in the book of my life but the master chapter.

It was hard. I was not prepared for it. Not practically and not even emotionally. But I had to learn. I knew I had found the right person and I would have never allowed any obstacle to make me lose the best thing that ever happened to me.

The beginning was complicated. There was a lot of misunderstanding and hard moments. I had to learn how to listen to my feelings and more importantly, I had to learn how to communicate them to my partner. I soon realized that the key to a successful long-distance relationship is communication. You must share the little details of your daily life to make your partner involved, and, at the same time, talk about your deep feelings and thoughts. We built our entire relationship on WhatsApp conversations.

Believe me or not, in 3 years we exchanged something like 300k messages. Basically, every moment of my relationship passed through messaging apps. The funniest moments with her 😂, the most romantic ones 😍, the fights 😡, our feelings ❤️. All our story was recorded and stored in our chat history.

I truly wanted to preserve and keep track of the most meaningful moments in those endless conversations, but obviously, I couldn’t re-read 300k messages. I tried all long-distance relationships apps to see if there was something that could help me to rediscover my chat history. Unfortunately, the only thing I found was a bunch of cuties app with a lot of useless features.

So… I decided to build my own app.

As I said, the main goal was to create something able to help me to keep track of the best messages with my partner. I wanted to have all my conversations organized in a diary, at my fingertips. In this way, I could have revisited them when I most needed it.

And I called the app TextVibes 😍.

The first version of TextVibes was a simple message organizer. You could import the chat history from external messaging apps (like WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram) and organize the best messages by categories and topics in a personal diary.

Even if it was very bugged, It was already far more useful than any other app for long-distance relationships.

But it was not enough. I still had the problem that re-reading and organizing 300k messages probably would have taken me years. I needed a tool that could save me time, separating automatically the most beautiful moments from the irrelevant ones, re-proposing me only the conversations that matter.

Luckily one of my best friends was specialized in Artificial Intelligence. I stressed him for months, but eventually, I convinced him to help me! We worked together all summer to create algorithms that could analyze my writing style, the most used emojis, and specific keywords. We trained the AI to recognize the most meaningful messages buried in my chat history.

And we did it! I launched TextVibes right in time for my marriage proposal 💍 as a gift for my girlfriend.

TextVibes started as a bespoke app to manage the best conversations in a long-distance relationship but can work for all people who actually want to save and rediscover the most beautiful moments inside their messaging apps. It doesn’t need to be a long-distance thing 😄.

In TextVibes, I put all my soul and my passion.

You can download it from the App Store or the Play Store.

Some Screenshots of TextVibes

After 3 long years, we are now happily married in London. I still use TextVibes for my daily chats with her and for all conversations with my friends and family.

I hope TextVibes will help you to preserve and revisit all the most important moments of your digital relationships.

TextVibes App

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