Pinky — Wave at Your Friends

Pinky is a pager app for iPhone. You tap a friend, pick an emoji, add up to 20 characters of text — and your avatar shows up in their Dynamic Island with a 5-minute countdown. No chat, no feed, no pressure to reply.This is my personal project.

A month ago I was driving home and couldn't get a reply from my wife. Didn't want to call — just not the right moment. I kept thinking: how do you get someone's attention outside of messengers?

And it hit me — what if my avatar just appeared in her Dynamic Island with a 😤 emoji and the words REPLY TO ME? Like a 90s pager, but nice looking.The idea stuck. A couple weeks later we went on a snowboard trip, and after a long day on the slopes I opened my laptop.

Modern messengers ask too much. You open a chat and you already have to write something, you wait for a reply, read receipts add pressure. Sometimes you just want to say "hey, I'm thinking of you" — without starting a conversation.

There was no tool for that. BeReal does something similar, but it's still content. I wanted a clean signal.

I started with the design in Figma. As a designer this is the most natural part — I wanted something with character, not just a utility interface.

No visual noise. Just what's needed.

Next to each friend's name there's a "Say hello" button. Tap it — a bottom sheet opens with 40 emojis in two scrollable rows, from 👋 and ❤️ to 🧠 and 🫡.

The emoji panel scrolls horizontally edge to edge. Below it — an optional short message, up to 20 characters. Hit send. That's it.

The friend gets a push notification that launches a Live Activity in Dynamic Island — a 5-minute countdown with your avatar, emoji and message.

This works through Apple Push Notification Service with push-to-start tokens, which means the Live Activity launches before the app is even opened.

The friend search screen shows results with avatar, name and @username — a two-line card with an action button.

Search works by name and username in real time. No phone number scraping, no public profiles. Just people you actually know.

If a user hasn't sent a wave in a while, the app gently nudges them with a series of 4 push notifications — on day 3, 7, 14 and 21. After day 21 the pushes stop.

As soon as the user sends a wave — the counter resets.This was a small but important detail. The app only works if both sides are active.

8 years ago I was a frontend developer, then moved fully into design. In 2023 I tried ChatGPT for coding — didn't really work, small context window, hard to do more than one screen. But at Yango Play we started working with Figma Make, Lovable and Cursor, and my belief came back.

For Pinky I used Claude Code with MCP for Figma. This let me pass the design directly into code — no manual interpretation. The result was accurate: animations, spring transitions, light and dark theme.

Honestly, 70% of the way from design to working code I covered with Claude. Sure, there's messy code under the hood that any real developer would rewrite immediately. But the app works.

The app is live in App Store — https://apps.apple.com/ae/app/pinky-wave/id6759859159

This isn't a product for a million users. It's a tool for a close circle — and that's exactly where it works best.

Vibe coding actually works for pet projects. Not for serious production, but for testing ideas and shipping something personal — the speed is just on a different level.

Also Dynamic Island is an underrated design space. Most apps treat it like a notification. You can do a lot more with it.

Wave at your friends. That's it. That's the app. 👋