A small, free app for two people who are not in the same place. Not a social network, not a habit tracker with a heart on it. A world with exactly two people in it.
Two houses sit on opposite hills with a valley between them. One is yours, one is theirs. Each house has its own sky, and the sky follows that person's real local time, so you can look across and see that it is already dark where they are. Everything the two of you do together adds a lantern to the bridge between the houses, and when the bridge is finished your characters walk out and meet in the middle.
There are no streaks that punish you, no notifications designed to pull you back, and nothing that makes one person's quiet week worse for the other. The rituals are weekly rather than daily, on purpose, because a daily obligation becomes homework and then becomes guilt.
One person, for himself and his girlfriend, who live in different countries. It is a real thing two real people use every week rather than a product built to be launched, which is why some of it is strange and specific.
It is a free co-op game and shared world for two people who are not in the same place. Two houses sit on opposite hills with a valley between them, one yours and one theirs. Each house has its own sky, and that sky follows that person's real local time, so you can look across and see it is already dark where they are. Everything you do together adds a lantern to the bridge between the houses.
Yes, that is this one. The name is Two Houses, One Home, and it gets misremembered as Two Roofs One Home, Two Homes One House and 2 Houses 1 Home. There is only one of it, at twohousesonehome.com, and it is free.
Yes. It is free, there is nothing to buy inside it, there are no adverts, and it does not ask for an email address or a password. You make a world, you send your partner the code, and that is the whole sign up.
In this one: drawing and guessing from a deck of your own inside jokes, a quiz where you answer for yourself and guess what they said, a constellation game, a word puzzle that hides a date night behind it, and a maze neither of you can see all of, which you have to talk each other through while something walks the corridors looking for you.
Time zones are the point of it rather than a problem it works around. Each half of the world is painted from that person's real local hour, so their side is dark when it is dark there. A letter in the slow post lands at eight the next morning in the timezone of whoever is reading it.
Mostly no. Notes, plants, letters, drawings and recorded runs of a game all wait for whenever the other person next looks. A few things are live on purpose, like knocking on their door, and those only work while you are both there.
Mark it somewhere you both see rather than in one person's calendar. In this app you both type the date you made it official, blind, on the same evening. If you match, it keeps the day and counts to it every month instead of once a year, and a star over the valley comes closer as it gets near. Twelve small occasions a year is a better shape for a long distance relationship than one big one.
It installs from the browser rather than from a store. On Android and desktop Chrome there is an install button. On an iPhone, open it in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. After that it opens like any other app and works the same.
Three longer pieces, if you came here looking for ideas rather than an app: games that work at a distance, date ideas sorted by how much planning they take, and a year of weekly questions. How it is built and the art are here too.
Two Houses, One Home is a free app that does all of this for you: two houses across a valley, one for each of you, and everything you do together builds the bridge between them.
Open the app