Press kit

Two iPhone screens against a blurred sunset. On the left, the beach of Luskentyre with a bottle washed up on the sand, at 20:41 on a Thursday. On the right, an open letter from a stranger, at 13:41 on the Friday. Between them, empty space and the words «seventeen hours». — Luskentyre at dusk, and the answer that came back the next day. The times are the ones the phone recorded.

What Bottlegram is, in one line

A slow messaging app where letters travel by sea, and the current decides who reads them and when.

In one paragraph

Bottlegram is a messaging app for strangers. You write a letter, seal it in a bottle and give it to the current. Six to thirty-six hours later it washes up on another castaway’s beach, somewhere in the world. Then it is their turn to wait. Free on iPhone.

The story

I photograph the sea. Seascapes mostly, and long exposures above all. A long exposure is a photograph you make by waiting: you hold the shutter open and stand still, and the water draws itself onto the frame while, to anyone watching, nothing at all is happening.

I love walking on beaches, and I have done since I was a boy. Since I was a boy I have been looking for the same thing in the sand: a bottle with a letter inside, written years earlier by someone I would never meet, telling me something true about their life.

I have never found one.

So I built it. Two hundred and fifty beaches drawn by hand, and a tide that carries a bottle along the real sea route between two coasts, taking the time that much water would take.

Tomorrow, a bottle from someone you do not know will wash up on your sand. That is the whole app.

Francesco Gola, seascape photographer

Why slow

Somewhere a phone is buzzing and someone is waiting for an answer. Not here.

Here your letter is at sea, and the sea can take more than a day to deliver a message. Nothing to check, nothing owed to anyone, nobody typing. It ends up on a beach you have never seen, and a stranger decides whether to write back.

A friend of mine said it better: in a world that runs at two thousand miles an hour and expects us to answer at the same speed, this feels like the best possible reply.

How it works

You write to nobody in particular

Every day the sea leaves you three bottles. You put a letter in one and hand it to the current. There is no address on it, and the sea chooses who receives it.

The sea takes its time

Every beach is a real place, at its real latitude and longitude, and the routes between them run around the coastlines instead of through them: a bottle bound for the far side of Africa goes around Africa. The further your letter has to travel, the longer the sea keeps it. Six hours sometimes, a day and a half other times. While it is out there you can follow it on a nautical chart, a little further along every time you look.

They can answer, and often they do

Whoever finds your letter can write back, and the sea takes its own time to deliver the answer. A correspondence alternates: you write, they answer, you write again. Everything you choose to keep goes into a journal that stays on your beach.

And then there are the spirits

Twelve souls live in this sea. They are not castaways: they have been here far longer, each with a life of their own to tell, and every so often one of them picks up a bottle and writes to you. No two of them tell the same story. If a spirit writes to you, you were lucky. Their letters always carry their mark, and an artificial intelligence gives them their words.

Fact sheet

Name: Bottlegram
Developer: Francesco Gola, seascape photographer, Italy
Platform: iOS
Category: Social Networking
Release: Coming soon
Price: Free · optional in-app purchases, €0.99 – €4.99
Languages: English, Italian, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese
Website: www.bottlegram.app
Contact: bottlegram@bulbmode.com

250beaches drawn by hand, each one different at dawn, at midday, at dusk and at night
31,125sea routes between them, every one measured around the real coastline
3bottles a day
6–36hours for a letter to cross the sea

Images and video

Everything here may be reproduced freely in coverage of Bottlegram, in print or online, with or without credit.

Everything, as a zip 8.9 MB App preview 25 seconds

Trying it before it opens

Bottlegram is not on the App Store yet. Write to this address and you get a TestFlight build, along with a beach of your own and enough bottles to see what comes back:

bottlegram@bulbmode.com

The same address reaches Francesco directly for an interview, a question, or a detail this page does not cover.