For decades, tech has been obsessed with making communication faster. Now, apparently, we’ve had enough. As The New York Times reports, the latest trend is slow tech, with apps like Carrier Pidge and Roost deliberately making messages take minutes, hours or even longer to arrive. Yes, we’re talking about digital carrier pigeons. Carrier Pidge launched in April and recently jumped from a few hundred users to more than 75,000, while Roost reportedly reached 650,000 downloads this month.
Apparently, waiting is cool again
Carrier Pidge lets you send a message via a digital pigeon whose journey you can track on a map. Its speed is based on real racing pigeons, topping out at 110mph, and there’s even a tiny 0.2% chance your bird disappears, meaning you’ll have to cough up 99 cents for a replacement. Roost takes the idea even further, offering more than 1,000 animals, from pigeons and penguins to snails that crawl along at a wonderfully useless pace.
The appeal isn’t really the wildlife. It’s the friction. Instead of another instant notification demanding your attention, you actually have to wait for someone to respond. That may actually matter more than we think: research has suggested that constantly picking up your phone in short bursts can be more mentally taxing than simply spending a long stretch on it. Carrier Pidge’s 29-year-old creator, Noah Iarrobino, previously made an app that charged users 99 cents every time they hit snooze, while Roost creator Logan Mendelsohn comes from the trust-and-safety tech world and is now planning to hire as the app grows.
Maybe our phones got a little too good at being phones
There may actually be something behind the silliness. A 2023 survey found that 80% of Gen Z adults, defined in the survey as people born after 1997, worried their generation relied too heavily on technology. Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, argues that our brains aren’t particularly well suited to a completely friction-free world where information arrives faster than we can process it.
And people aren’t just tolerating the slowness — they’re embracing it. One user told The New York Times that she and her friends even started writing to each other in Bridgerton-esque language, calling one another “my dearest lady.”
After decades of making everything faster, maybe the next killer feature really is making us wait. And honestly, if sending a text by pigeon is what it takes to make our phones a little less exhausting, perhaps we shouldn’t laugh at the birds just yet.